Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big.
That doesn't mean you need a gigawatt of power before achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not for inference which scales horizontally.
With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time, and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those, but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and just keep launching them on a cadence.
I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
Good point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping" some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a wash).
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?
"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).
It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.
1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites
For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for the items you listed, but it may not be true that everything is more difficult in space.
Let's say with no atmosphere and no night cycle, a space solar panel is 5x better. Deploying 5x as many solar panels on the ground is still going to come in way under the budget of the space equivalent.
And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside what you designed for occurs.
just take cost of getting kg in space and compare it to how much solar panel will generate
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000. So we're at $13.3(3)/Watt. We need to double it because same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping
Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.
The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing more money at it gets you more satellites.
At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.
>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.
Can only speculate out of thin air - B200 and Ryzen 9950x made on the same process and have 11x difference in die size. 11 Ryzens would cost $6K, and with 200Gb RAM - $8K. Googling brings that the B200 cost or production is $6400. That matches the numbers from the Ryzen based estimate above (Ryzen numbers is retail, yet it has higher yield, so balance). So, i'd guess that given Google scale a TPU similar to B200 should be $6K-$10K.
It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.
A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
It looks like you’re comparing the cost of installing solar panels on the ground with the cost of just transporting them to orbit. You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
> putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
You are presented with a factual, verifiable, statement that starship has been promised for years and that all that's been delivered is something capable of sending a banana to LEO. Wayyyy overdue too.
You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!
The bean counters at NVidia recently upped the expected lifecycle from 5 years to 6. On paper, you are expected now to get 6 years out of a GPU for datacenter use, not 3-5.
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.
This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).
Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever
> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth
Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space.
> since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government
More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.
> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space
Surely given starlinks 5ish year deorbit plan, you could design a platform to hold up for that long... And instead of burning the whole thing up you could just refurbish it when you swap out the actual rack contents, considering that those probably have an even shorter edge lifespan.
Starlinks are built to safely burn up on re-entry. A big reusable platform will have to work quite differently to never uncontrollably re-enter, or it might kill someone by high velocity debris on impact.
This adds weight and complexity and likely also forces a much higher orbit.
I can’t wait for all the heavy metals that are put into GPUs and other electronics showering down on us constantly. Wonder why the billionaires have their bunkers.
> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong
I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.
> when he talks about subject outside of his domain
Hate to burst your bubble. But I have a background in aerospace engineering. I’ve financed stuff in this field, from launch vehicles to satellites. And I own stakes in a decent chunk of the plays in this field. Both for and against this hypothesis.
So yeah, I’ll hold my ground on having reasonable basis for being sceptical of blanket dismissals of this idea as much as I dismiss certainty in its success.
There are a lot of cheap shots around AI and aerospace. Some are coming from Musk. A lot are coming from one-liner pros. HN is pretty good at filtering those to get the good stuff, which is anyone doing real math.
That actually confirms what the other commenter said.
Your assertion was "Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments" and you haven't demonstrated any expertise is building data centers.
You've given a very extraordinary claim about DC costs, with no evidence presented, nor expertise cited to sway our priors.
So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.
I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.
1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.
2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs
3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.
4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...
He said bullshit budget, not budget. He's thinking about opportunity and attention costs, not saying that permits literally have a higher price tag than GPUs.
> Source? I can't immediately find anything like that
I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.
that may have been the case before but it is not anymore. I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree house. also see provisions in OBBB
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
Where a random malicious president can't just hijack the government and giga-companies can't trivially lobby lawmakers for profits at the expense of citizens?
So why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
I meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
Then maybe you should move here. We have in most cases well functioning regulations. Of course there are counter examples where it has been bad but data centers is not one of them. It is easy to get permits to build one.
Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.
Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.
A Starlink satellite is mainly just receiving and sending data, the bare minimum of a data center-satellite's abilities; everything else comes on top and would be the real power drain.
Amazon’s new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for compute.
This is the main point I think. I am very much convinced that SpaceX is capbable to put a datacenter into space. I am not convinced they can do it cheaper than building a datacenter on earth.
> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.
So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.
Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously that's going to impact efficiency.
Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre. It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea is.
Because 10K satellites have a FAR greater combined surface area than a single space-borne DC would. Stefan-Boltzman law: ability to radiate heat increase to the 4th power of surface area.
50MW is on the small side for an AI cluster - probably less than 50k gpus.
if the current satellite model dissipates 5kW, you can't just add a GPU (+1kW). maybe removing most of the downlink stuff lets you put in 2 GPUs? so if you had 10k of these, you'd have a pretty high-latency cluster of 20k GPUs.
I'm not saying I'd turn down free access to it, but it's also very cracked. you know, sort of Howard Hughesy.
> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate.
This isn't quite true. It's very possible that the majority of that power is going into the antennas/lasers which technically means that the energy is being dissipated, but it never became heat in the first place. Also, 5KW solar power likely only means ~3kw of actual electrical consumption (you will over-provision a bit both for when you're behind the earth and also just for safety margin).
> Why is starlink possible and other computations are not?
Aside from the point others have made that 50 MW is small in the context of hyperscalers, if you want to do things like SOTA LLM training, you can't feasibly do it with large numbers of small devices.
Density is key because of latency - you need the nodes to be in close physical proximity to communicate with each other at very high speeds.
For training an LLM, you're ideally going to want individual satellites with power delivery on the order of at least about 20 MW, and that's just for training previous-generation SOTA models. That's nearly 5,000 times more power than a single current Starlink satellite, and nearly 300 times that of the ISS.
You'd need radiator areas in the range of tens of thousands of square meters to handle that. Is it theoretically technically possible? Sure. But it's a long-term project, the kind of thing that Musk will say takes "5 years" that will actually take many decades. And making it economically viable is another story - the OP article points out other issues with that, such as handling hardware upgrades. Starlink's current model relies on many cheap satellites - the equation changes when each one is going to be very, very expensive, large, and difficult to deploy.
Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things.
They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices.
Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
Think about the stock return over a period - its composed of capital gains and dividends.
Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher.
What does this mean? Less retained earnings / cashflows that can be re-invested.
Apple is the only one that will come out of this OK. The others will be destroyed for if they dont return cash, the cash balance will be discounted leading to a further reduction in the value of equity. The same thing that happened to Zuckerberg and Meta with the Metaverse fiasco.
Firms in the private sphere will go bust/acquired.
> Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher
This is not how corporate finance works. Capital gains and losses apply to assets. And only the most disciplined companies boost dividends in the face of decline—most double down and try to spend their way back to greatness.
It'll be a combination of advertising and subscription fees, and there will only be a few big winners.
Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here.
Microsoft is toast, short of a miracle. I'd bet against Office and Windows here. As Office goes down, it's going to take Windows down with it. The great Office moat is about to end. The company struggles, the stock struggles, Azure gets spun off (unlock value, institutional pressure), Office + Windows get spun off - the company splits into pieces. The LLMs are an inflection point for Office and Microsoft is super at risk, backwards regarding AI and they're slow. The OpenAI pursuit as it was done, was a gigantic mistake for Microsoft - one of the dumbest strategies in the history of tech, it left them with their pants down. Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be complacent.
Grok is very unlikely to make it (as is). The merger with SpaceX guarantees its death as a competitor to GPT/Gemini/Claude, it's over. Maybe they'll turn Grok into something useful to SpaceX. More likely they'll slip behind and it'll die rapidly like Llama. The merger is because they see the writing on the wall, this is a bailout to the investors (not named Elon) of xAI, as the forced Twitter rollup was a bailout for the investors of Twitter.
Claude is in a weird spot. What they have is not worth $300-$500 billion. Can they figure out how to build a lot more value out of what they have today (and get their finances sustainable), before the clock runs out? Or do they get purchased by Meta, Microsoft, etc.
OpenAI has to rapidly roll out the advertising model and get the burn rate down to meaningless levels, so they're no longer dependent on capital markets for financing (that party is going to end suddenly).
Meta is permanently on the outside looking in. They will never field an in-house competitor to GPT or Gemini that can persistently keep up. Meta doesn't know what it is or why it should be trying to compete with GPT/Gemini/Claude. Their failure (at this) is already guaranteed. They should just acquire GPT 4o and let their aging userbase on FB endlessly talk itself into the grave for the next 30 years while clicking ads.
If Amazon knew what they were doing (they don't right now), they would: immediately split retail + ads and AWS. The ad business ensures that the retail business will continue to thrive and would be highly lucrative. Then have AWS purchase Anthropic when valuations drop, bolt it on to AWS everything. Far less of an anti-trust issue than if what is presently known as Amazon attempted it here and now. Anthropic needs to build a lot on to itself to sustain itself and justify its valuation, AWS already has the answer to that.
If valuations plunge, and OpenAI is not yet sustainable, Microsoft should split itself into pieces and have the Windows-Office division purchase OpenAI as their AI option. It'd be their only path to avoiding anti-trust blocking that acquisition. As is Microsoft would not be allowed to buy OpenAI. Alternatively Microsoft can take a shot at acquiring Anthropic at some point - this seems likely given the internal usage going on at Redmond, the primary question is anti-trust (but in this case, Anthropic is viewed as the #3, so Microsoft would argue it bolsters competition with GPT & Gemini).
"Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here"
Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make products for the sake of it, else the technology is not accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core thing, along side superior marketing.
One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user tremendously for switching.
Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out where they can take advantage of the investments others have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.
Merging with SpaceX means they don't have to pay for their existence. Anyway they're probably positioned better than any other AI player except maybe Gemini.
I don’t follow why merging with SpaceX means they don’t have to pay for their existence. Someone does. Presumably now that is SpaceX. What is SpaceX’s revenue?
Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively unlimited money through the US Government, either via ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?
A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).
There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.
> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic.
Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.
It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around
While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation stealing copyright content is not okay any more
In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a value of $0 with the claim:
"More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space"
My bold claim: The cost of cooling will not be $0. The cost of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling in space will not be $0.
They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:
- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;
- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;
- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;
- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;
NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done, they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about dT not delta T
(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.
It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.
Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides.
Heat pumps are magic. They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
I share your enthusiasm about heat pumps, but I wonder what the efficiency of using waste heat is. Couldn't it be competitive with heat pumps? As it's a waste product, isn't it reasonable to also expect it to be more than 100% efficient?
The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
Typically in capitalism, if there is any profit, the race is towards zero profit. The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly (or duopoly, or some other stable arrangement). I assume the latter is the goal, but that means burning through like 50%+ of american gdp growth just to be undercut by china.
Imo I would be extremely angry if I owned any spacex equity. At least nvidia might be selling to china in the short term... what's the upside for spacex?
People keep saying this but it's simply untrue. AI inference is profitable. Openai and Anthropic have 40-60% gross margins. If they stopped training and building out future capacity they would already be raking in cash.
They're losing money now because they're making massive bets on future capacity needs. If those bets are wrong, they're going to be in very big trouble when demand levels off lower than expected. But that's not the same as demand being zero.
those gross profit margins aren't that useful since training at fixed capacity is continually getting cheaper, so there's a treadmill effect where staying in business requires training new models constantly to not fall behind. If the big companies stop training models, they only have a year before someone else catches up with way less debt and puts them out of business.
Only if training new models leads to better models. If the newly trained models are just a bit cheaper but not better most users wont switch. Then the entrenched labs can stop training so much and focus on profitable inference
A significant number of AI companies and investors are hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but I suppose it might be possible. Which wouldn't make it any more sane.
But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the machine god first." Make of this what you will.
There's a synergy effect here - Tesla sells you a solar roof and car bundle, the roof comes without a battery (making it cheaper) and the car now gets a free recharge whenever you're home (making it cheaper in the long term).
Of course that didn't work out with this specific acquisition, but overall it's at least a somewhat reasonable idea.
It's obviously a pretty weird thing for a car company to do, and is probably just a silly idea in general (it has little obvious benefit over normal solar panels, and is vastly more expensive and messy to install), but in principle it could at least work, FSOV work. The space datacenter thing is a nonsensical fantasy.
In comparison to datacenters in space yes. Solar roofs are already a profitable business, just not likely to be high growth. Datacenters in space are unlikely to ever make financial sense, and even if they did, they are very unlikely to show high growth due to continuing ongoing high capital expenses inherent in the model.
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
> Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world. So it is worth all the effort to be the first.
I _think_ the idea is that the first one to hit self improving AGI will, in a short period of time, pull _so_ far ahead that competition will quickly die out, no longer having any chance to compete economically.
At the same time, it'd give the country controlling it so much economic, political and military power that it becomes impossible to challenge.
I find that all to be a bit of a stretch, but I think that's roughly what people talking about "the AI race" have in mind.
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
We can tell because it’s not being treated as a serious goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part that’s really exciting to kids who get particularly excited by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus is on developing all the less glamorous but equally essential components of a successful Mars mission, like making sure the crew stays healthy.
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
The only way I see this actually working given the resource requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of the solar panels at L1 or something.
This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is much lower and it’s the temperature difference which determines the rate of cooling.
Basically you concentrate the heat into a high emissivity high temperature material that’s facing deep space and is shaded. Radiators get dramatically smaller as temperature goes up because radiation scales as T⁴ (Stefan–Boltzmann). There are many cases in space where you need to radiate heat - see Kerbal Space Program
"High emissivity, high temperature" sounds good on paper, but to create that temperature gradient within your spacecraft the way you want costs a lot of energy. What you actually do is add a shit load of surface area to your spacecraft, give that whole thing a coating that improves its emissivity, and try your hardest to minimize the thermal gradient from the heat source (the hot part) throughout the radiator. Emissivity isn't going past 1 in that equation, and you're going to have a very hard time getting your radiator to be hotter than your heat source.
Note that KSP is a game that fictionalizes a lot of things, and sizes of solar panels and radiators are one of those things.
What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.
Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)
Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.
AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.
Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.
This is widely believed (especially in the US, where, other than the Leaf, most early electric cars never launched), but honestly pretty dubious. The first real electric cars, with significant production:
2010 - Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan Leaf
2011 - Smart electric, Volvo C30 electric, Ford Focus electric, BYD e6.
2012 - Renault Zoe (Renault launched a couple of other vehicles on the same platform ~2010, but they never saw significant production), Tesla Model S (Tesla had a prior car, the Roadster, but it never saw significant production).
2013 - VW eUP, eGolf (VW occasionally put out an electric Golf historically, going back to 1992, but again those were never produced in large quantities).
The big change ~2010 was around the economics of lithium ion batteries; they finally got cheap enough that everyone started pulling their concept designs and small-scale demonstration models into full production.
I think you under appreciate him a bit here. No he's not a super genius. He's probably not even a good engineer. But he is a) a total a.hole and b) a tremendous bullshitter. There are circumstances in which you need such a person to succeed (see also Steve Jobs). He yelled at people for 10 years straight and he was crucial in facilitating capital to build these very capital intensive products. A regular smart person would absolutely not have succeeded, for these reasons.
I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.
They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.
I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a specific source of latent demand that is large enough to soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver, then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a business plan that’s been thought through as clearly as a $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.
“Defense” is not nearly specific enough to count as an answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.
But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.
Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
Be careful with the math there. While a 4th power is awesome you got the Stefan-Boltzman constant to consider and that's on the order of 10^-8
Radiative power is really efficient for hot things but not so great when you're trying to keep things down to normal levels. Efficient for shedding heat from a sun but not so much for keeping a cpu from overheating...
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.
His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
If any single country tried to create a whole production chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the economics would ever work out.
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in particular come to mind:
The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.
For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.
I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.
Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.
Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.
Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.
Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
> some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot
Hillary (he features on the NZ Five Dollar note) was one of those guys who does things for no good reason. He also went to both poles. This only tells us that it is indeed possible, but not that it's desirable or will become routine.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
Yes, that’s what we’re talking about. Data centers in space.
You put the cold side of the phase change on the internal cooling loop, step up the external cooling loop as high temp as you can and then circulate that through the radiators. You might even do this step up more than once.
Imagine the data center like a box, you want it to be cold inside, and there’s a compressor, you use to transfer heat from inside to outside, the outside gets hot, inside cold. You then put a radiator on the back of the box and radiate the heat to the darkness of space.
This is all very dependent on the biggest and cheapest rockets in the world but it’s a tradeoff of convenience and serviceability for unlimited free energy.
Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again? A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing through it?
The other two methods of heat transfer apart from radiation are conduction (through “touch”, adjacent molecules, eg from the outside of a chicken on the BBQ to the inside) and convection (through movement, eg cold air or water flowing past).
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
I think it's actually the other way around, satellites need to be specifically designed to burn up fast in the atmosphere. See for example the warnings about space debris from Chinese satellites not designed with this in mind.
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
> a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.
In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).
Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.
All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.
This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.
What do you think about droplet radiators? E.g. using a ferrofluid with magnetic containment for capture and enough spare on board to last five years of loss due to occasional splashes?
Second, are you saying that we basically need to have a radiator as big (approximately) as the solar panels?
That is a lot, but it does sound manageable, in the sense that it approximately doubles what we require anyway for power.
So, not saying that it’s easy or feasible, but saying that cooling then seems “just” as difficult as power, not insurmountably more difficult. (Note that the article lists cooling, radiation, latency, and launch costs as known hard problems, but not power.)
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.
Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).
This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost.
Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, or grid collapses.
Servers in orbit are physically isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots, local warfare, or physical break-ins.
Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up land for housing or nature.
Space data centers do not deplete Earth’s freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers which consume billions of gallons annually.
Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.
Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments.
Data transmission can be faster in space because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does through fiber optic cables.
Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw data back to Earth
While it’s true that there are no floods or earthquakes in space it’s not exactly a safe place to be. Radiation and cosmic rays become a much greater threat. Shielding provided by the atmosphere would have to be replaced.
You also underestimate the cooling problem. The fact that space is cold doesn’t mean it’s easy to cool things off in space. On earth the main cooling strategy is to transfer heat through direct contact and move the hot stuff away. Be it air or water, as you mentioned. In space your only option is to radiate heat away. And that’s while half of you is under intense sunlight.
I think you also undersell the thread of warfare in space. Sure, a guy with Molotov can’t get you space data center but we’ve had satellite shot down. So maybe not every war is a threat but, say China or Russia (or other space-faring nation) could take care of a satellite if absolutely needed.
National seizures are also still a threat. If only being ousted national borders was such a great defense we’d see some data centers in the sea by now.
So being in space is immune to some of the known problems but also comes with a whole lot of novel issues, not solved at scale yet. And so far I haven’t seen any sufficiently detailed proposed solutions to even consider the trade of known problems with readily available solutions for new issues with lots of unknowns.
They may well avoid terrestrial threats by having them in space, but then they become subject to different threats such as solar storms, high energy cosmic rays, space debris collisions etc.
I think the main reason to host them in space is to escape Earth jurisdictions, but even that is dubious as there will be people involved that reside on the Earth.
The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.
> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.
There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant regular x86 years ago, that's true.
I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up, and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.
No, he's not. Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
> AWST: So, NASA does not require SpaceX to use radiation-hardened computer systems on the Dragon?
John Muratore: No, as a matter of fact NASA doesn't require it on their own systems, either. I spent 30 years at NASA and in the Air Force doing this kind of work. My last job was chief engineer of the shuttle program at NASA, and before that as shuttle flight director. I managed flight programs and built the mission control center that we use there today.
On the space station, some areas are using rad-hardened parts and other parts use COTS parts. Most of the control of the space station occurs through laptop computers which are not radiation hardened.
> Q: So, these flight computers on Dragon – there are three on board, and that's for redundancy?
A: There are actually six computers. They operate in pairs, so there are three computer units, each of which have two computers checking on each other. The reason we have three is when operating in proximity of ISS, we have to always have two computer strings voting on something on critical actions. We have three so we can tolerate a failure and still have two voting on each other. And that has nothing to do with radiation, that has to do with ensuring that we're safe when we're flying our vehicle in the proximity of the space station.
I went into the lab earlier today, and we have 18 different processing units with computers in them. We have three main computers, but 18 units that have a computer of some kind, and all of them are triple computers – everything is three processors. So we have like 54 processors on the spacecraft. It's a highly distributed design and very fault-tolerant and very robust.
> Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
Those are not independent facts. They put the hardware inside, behind the radiation shielding they use to keep the astronauts safe. It's why regular old IBM laptops work on the Space Station too. That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget if you use it on these satellites.
SpaceX, which prefers COTS components when it can use them, still went with AMD Versal chips for Starlink. Because that kind of high performance, small process node hardware doesn't last long in space otherwise (phone SoC-based cubesats in LEO never lasted more than a year, and often only a month or so).
Which is exactly how you'd do a hypothetical dc in space. Come on, you're arguing for the sake of arguing. CotS works. This is not an issue.
> That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget
SpX is already leading in upmass by a large margin. Starship improves mass to orbit. Again, this is a "solved" issue.
There are other problems in building space DCs. Rad hardening is not one of them. AI training is so fault tolerant already that this was never an issue.
When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.
1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.
2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.
3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.
As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.
A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:
- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.
- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.
- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.
3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)
As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective.
- In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1]
- heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface area by the factor of 5-10
- data center in space could provide advantages for processing space data, instead of sending them all to earth.
- the Lonestar project proved that data storage and edge processing in space (moon, cislunar) is possible.
- A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget:
+ optical connections reduce heat
+ photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT)
+ processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,
> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.
They do have to be if they want to be approved by the FCC.
And btw Kessler syndrome applies to any orbital band. You've got the logic backwards. Kessler syndrome is usually only considered a threat for LEO because that's where most of the satellites are. But if you're throwing million(s) of satellites into orbit, it becomes an issue at whatever orbital height you pick.
This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.
There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations.
However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
When we really consider the challenges of deploying orders of magnitude more terrestrial solar, it really requires a more detailed and specific critique of the orbital vision. Positive includes near continuous solar exposure (in certain orbits) and no water requirements.
Much has been said of cooling but remember, there is a lot of literal space between the satellites for radiative cooling fins. It is envisioned they would network via optical links, and each mini satellite would be roughly on the order of a desktop GPU (not a whole data center rack). The vision is predicated on leveraging a ton of space for lots of mini satellites on the order of a Dell desktop tower. The terrestrial areas that are really cold are also not that great for solar exposure.
Personally I don't know how it will play out but the core concern I have about making these kinds of absolutist predictions is they make weak assumptions about the sustainable scalability of terrestrial power. And that is definitely the case here in that it only looks at the manufacturing cost of solar.
> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need.
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
Why are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
> Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach?
My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
> Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
And which of those is also an American institution, with American educated employees and American cultural values, operating in an American legal and business framework?
Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th grade STEM class down the street!
Russia would've been a much better comparison given the history of the world we live in, but still not apples to apples.
Shedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
I always felt that Microsoft's winning move was to be consistently mediocre. They just waited until competitors screwed up. Now they're following in IBMs or Intel's footsteps - concentrating everything on the enterprise market and slowly dying.
What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive for lots of reasons.
> it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC
This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60 satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per year of today's Falcon 9...
The argument about problems of dissipating heat still stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically, out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on LEO.
Even the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.
So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.
The ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data centers in space in the GW range.
Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200 metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.
Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.
> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS
It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.
And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing density on communication satellites, if we could dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue they would have like triple the capacity and could just drop everything back to the US (like their fans think they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to a ground station usually in the same country as the source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.
I have actually argued this from the other side, and I reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.
IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its heavy again, and several space engineering types want to slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems to be preferred.
I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then other, better people step in to actually do it. Also triple the time he says it will take to solve the problem.
And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
If you had a thermometer that had no heat generation then yes.
If you have a resistor or other heat generating circuit then you need to have the needed surface area to radiate the heat away. If you don't, it will heat up. It's a rate problem.
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?
plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about 20% of the mass budget.
The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
I think what many people miss is that energy became far less location dependent if you put compute next to its generation.
The latency for token generation is not so important. So the ratios between energy consumed, bandwidth and latency would in theory favour building dark token factories in remote but optimal locations. But i guess construction and logistics are an issue.
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
Africa, Europe, America, Mars. I wonder if there is something about one of these that makes them unlike the others.
Actually, why not colonize Venus instead? Sure, it will be hard, at first, with all the sulphuric acid and intense heat and whatnot, but we colonized America, so why not Venus?
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.
Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have to make sense. The less sense the better.
Reasonably sure this has less to do with putting data centres in space and more to do with getting them less auditable (see the other news about X getting raided about Grok)
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
-------------------
Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it’s financially viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on reentry.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must be factoring in something else-
Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR controlled countries and/or sanctioned countries/individuals.
Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can REALLY verify system behavior once its up there. So NSA/CIA etc sure are chomping at the bit to allow it.
I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less outlandish/tinfoily as well.
I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)
BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.
People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to put a hard disk into orbit.
I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
For AI training, latency is one of the limiting factors, which needs to be kept in the nanoseconds. And a light-nanosecond is famously almost exactly 1 foot.
That's why Lumen/Starcloud's designs all assume it'll be a space station with all containers connected to one central networking spine.
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led
You to believe that itself.
I completely failed to convey my point. It’s not about any of your beliefs.
The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out of the noise, it was still just noise.
Where there is actual meaning in life, its kind of obvious, you dont have to rewrite so much to find it.
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and reality will stop changing.
Everything dies. Deal with it.
Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will never know. You do that by improving things, not burning limited resources on a conman.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load.
The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
Musk said in his autobiography he announced the hyperloop plan without any intention of doing it to distract from the California high speed rail plans.
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system
A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.
Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.
> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
You don't need orbital velocity to blow satellites away. Just do a well-timed suborbital launch against the satellite's orbit, and the satellite will provide most of the kinetic energy.
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000, so we're at $13.3(3)/Watt, that just power, let's assume that cooling will cost us same per kg, the same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping. We're already at $6.3 mil a pop for just hauling it up to orbit, with no cost of solar cells included
I'd imagine comparable hardware for just some solar + batteries on ground is around $200k. I dunno where the repeated 5x cost number comes from. I suspect whoever pushed it was just lying
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible. The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap and DIY-able.
I think it’s all farce and technically unsound, but I also think that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It’s really got him ready to rally investors behind “spreading the light of consciousness to the universe”. Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his machine girlfriend)’s machinations.
Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability.
While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than solve near-term compute constraints.
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
It is your money being spent. ~40B so far. Though half of that is for services.
But more abstractly, it's our resources that are being allocated. The planet as a unit is deciding where to put it's effort. Apparently we're not very good at this
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others.
Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
SpaceX made a request of the FCC to authorize a constellation of 1 million satellites. And these are going to be much larger, "data center" satellites. This many satellites, all in the same orbit (sun-synchronous is a specific orbit), vastly changes the math on Kessler syndrome.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.
Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it can have dramatically different emissivity.
Data centers in space make sense because its nigh impossible to build things terrestrially. NIMBYism is so out of control the largest solar array in the US in the middle of the mojave got cancelled because it would interfere with the view.
"Just change the law" ok sure we'll get right on it.
"Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective"
The author forgot to add that this is only true from the perspective of their own bias.
To someone else it might make a lot of sense, e.g. someone who expects militant resistance to the "data centers" from the general public or some other actor that is highly unlikely to achieve space capabilities.
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back out to whatever it would have done anyway.
You can debate this until you are blue in the face. If the costs are less they will do it. If they aren’t they won’t do it. That’s the only sense that needs to be made.
Ah, yes, the "efficient market hypothesis", it's well known that no company has ever gone bankrupt because every company only does things that are optimally efficient and profitable.
No company has ever made an investment in something that ended up being more expensive than calculated, or so expensive it bankrupted them.
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
1. Inference
2. Training
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...
Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
If someone had the tech to cool stuff in space, that is required for this to happen, they’d have tons of easier and more lucrative opportunities right now on Earth to become the new richest person.
It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for a decade because it's dominated by other costs.
Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
no, no, no, the key enabler to space datacenter is complete out-of-world computer 3D printers. You print entire 130nm, hell, even 130 micrometer GPUs and DDR2 VRAMs to go with, entirely on the Moon solely from Moon dusts, and shoot the complete satellites out into Earth LEO using maglev sleds. PUEs, opex, nothing matter because the Moon factory is self contained and don't interact with Earthian economy at all. The ssh key into the factory will be the source to free money to whoever holding it.
Is that possible in our lifetime? I'd be optimistic about that. Can SpaceX pull that off? Space what? ...
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o)
Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least).
TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.
The article kind of ended all of a sudden without much of a conclusion… but as most people by now have realised once they heard of the merging of Musk and Musk, it sounds more likely just a way of shifting money to pay himself rather than to actually build anything he says.
I’d even bet that when they do IPO, there will be ZERO mention of “space data centres” in the prospectus!
Another thing that doesn't make sense about them is that DCs get a lot of out of physical locality. Caches become hot as different use case spin up and down during the day near their customers.
If the nodes are spinning around the earth at orbital velocities, then all the benefits of physical locality are thrown out the window.
But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO would mean that latency to a client via a ground station wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better coverage.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
That does not have to sound reasonable to us ... only to Musk.
Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
What if they diverted a decent sized asteroid into earth orbit and put the data center onto that? Could it be put into a sun-synchronous orbit, cover one side with solar cells, and use the backside of the asteroid itself for cooling?
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax purposes).
This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.
It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.
There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Space is not cold or hot - it isn't. It's a vacuum. Vacuum has no temperature, but objects in space reach temperatures set by radiative balance with their environment. This makes it difficult to get rid of heat. On earth heat can be dumped through phase change and discharged (evaporation), or convection or any number of other ways. In space the only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away.
Superconductors don't have any resistance - and so heating from resistance isn't present. However, no super conducting computers have been created.
And yes, it is really impressive - but we're also talking about one chip in liquid helium on earth. One can speculate about the "what if we had..." but we don't. If you want to make up technologies I would suggest becoming a speculative fiction author.
Heating of the spacecraft would get it on the warm side.
> The same variations in temperature are observed in closer orbit around the Earth, such as at the altitudes that the International Space Station (ISS) occupies. Temperatures at the ISS range between 250° F in direct sunlight and -250° F in opposition to the Sun.
> You might be surprised to learn that the average temperature outside the ISS is a mild 50° F or so. This average temperature is above the halfway point between the two temperature extremes because objects in orbit obviously spend more time in partial sunlight exposure than in complete opposition to the Sun.
> The wild fluctuations of 500° F around the ISS are due to the fact that there is no insulation in space to regulate temperature changes. By contrast, temperatures on Earth’s surface don’t fluctuate more than a few degrees between day and night. Fortunately, we have an atmosphere and an ozone layer to insulate the Earth, protect it from the Sun’s most powerful radiation and maintain relatively consistent temperatures.
If you want solar power, you've got to deal with the 250 °F (121 °C). This is far beyond the specification for super conducting materials. For that matter, even -250 °F (-156 °C = 116 K) is much warmer than the super conducting chip range of 10 K.
Furthermore, the cryogenic material boils off in space quite significantly (I would suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot#LEO_d... or https://spacexstock.com/orbital-refueling-bottlenecks-what-i... "Even minor heat exposure can cause fuel to boil off, increasing tank pressure and leading to fuel loss. Currently, the technology for keeping cryogenic fuels stable in space is limited to about 14 hours.") You are going to have significant problems trying to keep things at super conducting temperatures for a day, much less a month or a year.
Even assuming that you can make a computer capable of doing AI training using super computers this decade (or even the next) ... zero resistance in the wire is not zero power consumption. That power consumption is again heat.
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> Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor.
Theoretically you can do whatever you want and run it on nuclear fusion. Practically, the technologies that you are describing are not things that are viable on earth, much less to try to ship a ton of liquid helium into space (that's even harder than shipping a ton of liquid hydrogen - especially since harvesting it is non-trivial).
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Computing creates heat. Maxwell's demon taught us that doing 1 & 1 and getting one creates heat. Every bit of computation creates heat - superconductor or no. This is an inescapable fact of classical computation. "Ahh," you say " - but you can do quantum computation"... and yes, it may work... and if you can get a quantum computer with a kilobit of qbits into space, I will be very impressed.
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One of the things that damages superconductors is radiation. On earth we've got a nice atmosphere blocking the worst of it. Chips in space tend to be radiation hardened. The JWST is using a BAE RAD750. The 750 should be something that rings a bell in the mind of people... its a PPC 750 - the type in a Macintosh G3... running between 110 and 200 Mhz (that is not a typo, it is not Ghz but Mhz).
High temperature super conductors (we're not dealing with the 10 kelvin but rather about 80 kelvin (still colder than -250 °F) are very sensitive to damage to their lattice. As they accumulate damage they become less superconductive and that causes problems when you've got a resistor heating up in the cryogenic computer.
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Your descriptions of the technology for superconducting computers is in the lab, at best decades from being something resembling science fact (much less a fact that you can lift into space).
Right. You build your computers out of superconductors, and they don't get hot.
Sadly, they also don't compute.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold? Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's shadow and the sun hits you.
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.
I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.
It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
> There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP.
For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping.
There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
> I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out.
I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.
It's exiting the 5th best social network and the 10th (or worse) best AI company and selling them to a decent company.
It probably increases Elon's share of the combined entity.
It delivers on a promise to investors that he will make money for them, even as the underlying businesses are lousy.
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?
A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).
Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.
A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.
When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.
And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
But the focus on building giant monolithic datacenters comes from the practicalities of ground based construction. There are huge overheads involved with obtaining permits, grid connections, leveling land, pouring concrete foundations, building roads and increasingly often now, building a power plant on site. So it makes sense to amortize these overheads by building massive facilities, which is why they get so big.
That doesn't mean you need a gigawatt of power before achieving anything useful. For training, maybe, but not for inference which scales horizontally.
With satellites you need an orbital slot and launch time, and I honestly don't know how hard it is to get those, but space is pretty big and the only reasons for denying them would be safety. Once those are obtained done you can make satellite inferencing cubes in a factory and just keep launching them on a cadence.
I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).
New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around ~150kW, can someone confirm?
The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously can't imagine something similar being deployed in orbit...
How much of that power is radiated as the radio waves it sends?
Good point - the comms satellites are not even "keeping" some of the energy, while a DC would. I _am_ now curious about the connection between bandwidth and wattage, but I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of the total energy dissipation on one of these DC satellites would be in the form of satellite-to-earth broadcast (keeping in mind that s2s broadcast would presumably be something of a wash).
I doubt half the power is to the transmitter, and radio efficiency is poor -- 20% might be a good starting point.
Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?
"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).
[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...
Entirely depends on band, at 10GHz more like 40%, at lower frequencies more, for example FM band can even go to 70%
the majority is likely in radio waves and the inter satellite laser communication
Inter sat comms cancels out - every kw sent by one sat is received by another.
It doesn't, because the beams are not so tight that they all fall on the target satellite, and not all of that is absorbed :P
For another reference, the Nvidia-OpenAI deal is reportedly 10GW worth of DC.
It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.
1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
3. Refurbishment is next to impossible
4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites
For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)
What about sourcing and the cost of energy? Solar Panels more efficient, no bad weather, and 100% in sunlight (depending on orbit) in space. Not that it makes up for the items you listed, but it may not be true that everything is more difficult in space.
Let's say with no atmosphere and no night cycle, a space solar panel is 5x better. Deploying 5x as many solar panels on the ground is still going to come in way under the budget of the space equivalent.
And it's not the same at all. 5x the solar panels on the ground means 5x the power output in the day, still 0 at night. So you'd need batteries. If you add in bad weather and winter, you may need battery capacity for days, weeks or even months, shifting the cost to batteries while still relying on nuclear of fossil backups in case your battery dies or some 3/4/5-sigma weather event outside what you designed for occurs.
Or you put the data centers at different points on earth?
Or you float them on the ocean circumnavigating the earth?
Or we put the datacenters on giant Zeppelins orbiting above the clouds?
If we are doing fantasy tech solutions to space problems, why not for a million other more sensible options?
That's with current launch costs, right? Nobody is claiming it's economic without another huge fall in launch costs, but that's what SpaceX is doing.
just take cost of getting kg in space and compare it to how much solar panel will generate
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000. So we're at $13.3(3)/Watt. We need to double it because same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping
I'm stretched to think of one thing that is easier in space. Anything I could imagine still requires getting there (in one piece)
Death, and some science. That's it?
Horseshoes.
Achieving a zero-gravity environment, or a vacuum?
Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
If they plan to put this things in a low orbit their useful life before reentry is low anyway.
A quick search gave me a lifespan of around 5 years for a starlink satellite.
If you put in orbit a steady stream of new satellites every year maintenance is not an issue, you just stop using worn out or broken ones.
> Solar panels in space are more efficient...
... if you completely ignore the difficulty of getting them up there. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the amount of energy required to get a solar panel into space, and the amount of energy it produces during its lifetime there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a net negative; getting mass into orbit requires a tremendous amount of energy, and putting it there with a rocket is not an efficient process.
My sketchy napkin math gives an order of magnitude of a few months of panel output to get it in space.
5kg, 500W panel (don’t exactly know what the ratio is for a panel plus protection and frame for space, might be a few times better than this)
Say it produces about 350kWh per month before losses.
Mass to LEO is something like 10x the weight in fuel alone, so that’s going to be maybe 500kWh. Plus cryogenics etc.
So not actually that bad
The cost might be the draw (if there is one). Big tech isn't afraid of throwing money at problems, but the AI folk and financiers are afraid of waiting and uncertainty. A satellite is crazy expensive but throwing more money at it gets you more satellites.
At the end of the day I don't really care either way. It ain't my money, and their money isn't going to get back into the economy by sitting in a brokerage portfolio. To get them to spend money this is as good a way as any other, I guess. At least it helps fund a little spaceflight and satellite R&D on the way.
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit
putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.
Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.
And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961
>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
Current cost to LEO is $1500 per kg
That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
>That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.
with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
>Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000
noise compare to the main cost - GPUs.
>There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.
Cheapness of location of your major investment - GPUs - may as well happen to be secondary to other considerations - power/cooling capacity stable availability, jurisdiction, etc.
> with the GPU costing the same, it would only double the capex.
Yes, only doubling the capex. With the benefits of, hmm, no maintenance access and awful networking?
Any idea, what is the estimated cost of a Google TPU. It may not make sense for Nvidia retail price but at cost price of Google.
Can only speculate out of thin air - B200 and Ryzen 9950x made on the same process and have 11x difference in die size. 11 Ryzens would cost $6K, and with 200Gb RAM - $8K. Googling brings that the B200 cost or production is $6400. That matches the numbers from the Ryzen based estimate above (Ryzen numbers is retail, yet it has higher yield, so balance). So, i'd guess that given Google scale a TPU similar to B200 should be $6K-$10K.
1 KW of solar panels is 150€ retail right now. You are probably at 80€ or less if you buy a few MW.
(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)
installation of large solar plants is largely automated already
> will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer
And maintenance and replacing parts and managing flights and ... You're trying to yadda-yadda so much opex here!
It is SpaceX/Elon who bet billions on that yadda-yadda, not me. I wrote "If" for $10/kg. I'm sure though that they would easily yadda-yadda under sub-$100/kg - which is $15M per flight. And even with those $100/kg the datacenters in space still make sense as comparable to ground based and providing the demand for the huge Starship launch capacity.
A datacenter costs ~$1000/ft^2. How much equipment per square foot is there? say 100kg (1 ton per rack plus hallway). Which is $1000 to put into orbit on Starship at $100/kg. At sub-$50/kg, you can put into orbit all the equipment plus solar panels and it would still be cheaper than on the ground.
It looks like you’re comparing the cost of installing solar panels on the ground with the cost of just transporting them to orbit. You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
>You can’t just toss raw solar panels out of a cargo bay.
That is exactly what you do - just like with Starlink - toss out the panels with attached GPUs, laser transmitter and small ion drive.
100 x 100 is 10,000.
> it is SpaceX/Elon
The known scammer guy? Like these ideas wouldn't pass the questions at the end of a primary school presentation.
> putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
What starship? The fantasy rocket Musk has been promising for 10 years or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
it is obviously predicated on Starship. All these discussions have no sense otherwise.
> or the real one that has thus far delivered only one banana worth of payload into orbit?
once it starts delivering real payloads, the time for discussions will be no more, it will be time to rush to book your payload slot.
You are presented with a factual, verifiable, statement that starship has been promised for years and that all that's been delivered is something capable of sending a banana to LEO. Wayyyy overdue too.
You meet this with "well, once it works, it'll be amazing and you'll be queuing up"? How very very musky!
What a cult.
The bean counters at NVidia recently upped the expected lifecycle from 5 years to 6. On paper, you are expected now to get 6 years out of a GPU for datacenter use, not 3-5.
To add space solar cell will weigh only 4-12kg as protection requirements are different.
source?
> The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low
Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean...
> Presumably they're planning on doing in-orbit propellant transfer to reboost the satellites so that they don't have to let their GPUs crash into the ocean
Hell, you're going to lose some fraction of chips to entropy every year. What if you could process those into reaction mass?
I believe that a modern GPU will burn out immediately. Chips for space are using ancient process nodes with chunky sized components so that they are more resilient to radiation. Deploying a 3nm process into space seems unlikely to work unless you surround it with a foot of lead.
Or cooling water/oil?
This brings a whole new dimension to that joke about how our software used to leak memory, then file descriptors, then ec2 instances, and soon we'll be leaking entire data centers. So essentially you're saying - let's convert this into a feature.
Another significant factor is that radiation makes things worse.
Ionizing radiation disrupts the crystalline structure of the semiconductor and makes performance worse over time.
High energy protons randomly flip bits, can cause latchup, single event gate rupture, destroy hardware immediately, etc.
If anything, considering this + limited satellite lifetime, it almost looks like a ploy to deal with the current issue of warehouses full of GPUs and the questions about overbuild with just the currently actively installed GPUs (which is a fraction of the total that Nvidia has promised to deliver within a year or two).
Just shoot it into space where it's all inaccessible and will burn out within 5 years, forcing a continuous replacement scheme and steady contracts with Nvidia and the like to deliver the next generation at the exact same scale, forever
And just like that you've added another not never done before, and definitely not at scale problem to the mix.
These are all things which add weight, complexity and cost.
Propellant transfer to an orbital Starship hasn't even been done yet and that's completely vital to it's intended missions.
Or maybe they want to just use them hard and deorbit them after three yesrs?
"Planning" is a strong word..
> Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth
Minus one big one: permitting. Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments.
But since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government. Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space.
> since building a datacenter almost anywhere on the planet is more convenient than outer space, surely you can find some suitable location/government
More convenient. But I'm balancing the cost equation. There are regimes where this balances. I don't think we're there yet. But it's irrational to reject it completely.
> Or put it on a boat, which is still 100 times more sensible than outer space
More corrosion. And still, interconnects.
> More corrosion
Surely given starlinks 5ish year deorbit plan, you could design a platform to hold up for that long... And instead of burning the whole thing up you could just refurbish it when you swap out the actual rack contents, considering that those probably have an even shorter edge lifespan.
Starlinks are built to safely burn up on re-entry. A big reusable platform will have to work quite differently to never uncontrollably re-enter, or it might kill someone by high velocity debris on impact.
This adds weight and complexity and likely also forces a much higher orbit.
Hopefully a sea platform does not end up flying into space all of its own, only to crash and burn back down.
Maybe the AI workloads running on it achieve escape velocity? ;)
I can’t wait for all the heavy metals that are put into GPUs and other electronics showering down on us constantly. Wonder why the billionaires have their bunkers.
Yeah, "burn up safely on reentry".
100 years later: "why does everything taste like cadmium?"
If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong.
> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong
I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.
Swear that fella is like the Elon Musk of HN - when he talks about subject outside of his domain he gets caught out.
> when he talks about subject outside of his domain
Hate to burst your bubble. But I have a background in aerospace engineering. I’ve financed stuff in this field, from launch vehicles to satellites. And I own stakes in a decent chunk of the plays in this field. Both for and against this hypothesis.
So yeah, I’ll hold my ground on having reasonable basis for being sceptical of blanket dismissals of this idea as much as I dismiss certainty in its success.
There are a lot of cheap shots around AI and aerospace. Some are coming from Musk. A lot are coming from one-liner pros. HN is pretty good at filtering those to get the good stuff, which is anyone doing real math.
That actually confirms what the other commenter said.
Your assertion was "Every datacentre I know going up right now is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments" and you haven't demonstrated any expertise is building data centers.
You've given a very extraordinary claim about DC costs, with no evidence presented, nor expertise cited to sway our priors.
Sounds very over-compensating that. Musk-type behaviour
It's also infinitly easier to get 24/7 unadulterated sunlight for your solar panels.
Not 24/7 in low earth orbit, but perhaps at an earth-moon or earth-sun L4/L5 lagrange point. Though with higher latency to earth.
So what? Why is it important to have 24/7 solar, that you cannot have on the ground? On the ground level you have fossil fuels.
I wonder if you were thinking about muh emissions for a chemical rocket launched piece of machinery containing many toxic metals to be burnt up in the air in 3-5 years... It doesn't sound more environmentally friendly.
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.
All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.
I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.
> you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development
Yes. These are permitted in weeks for small groups, days for large ones. (In America.)
Permitting is a legitimate variable that weighs in favor of in-space data centers.
> is spending 90% of their bullshit budget on battlig state and local governments
Source? I can't immediately find anything like that.
Parent just means "a lot" and is using 90% to convey their opinion. The actual numbers are closer to 0.083%[1][2][3][4] and parent thinks they should be 0.01-0.1% of the total build cost.
1. Assuming 500,000 USD in permitting costs. See 2.
2. Permits and approvals: Building permits, environmental assessments, and utility connection fees add extra expenses. In some jurisdictions, the approval process alone costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. https://www.truelook.com/blog/data-center-construction-costs
3. Assuming a 60MW facility at $10M/MW. See 4.
4. As a general rule, it costs between $600 to $1,100 per gross square foot or $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of commissioned IT load to build a data center. Therefore, if a 700,000-square foot, 60-megawatt data center were to be built in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market, it would cost between $420 million and $770 million to construct the facility, including its powered shell and equipping the building with the appropriate electrical systems and HVAC components. https://dgtlinfra.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-data-...
Yeah, I was trying to be nicer than "you're making it up" just in case someone has the actual numbers.
He said bullshit budget, not budget. He's thinking about opportunity and attention costs, not saying that permits literally have a higher price tag than GPUs.
> Source? I can't immediately find anything like that
I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.
Unless you're the single largest cost, your personal time says nothing about actual DC costs, does it?
Just admit it was hyperbole.
that may have been the case before but it is not anymore. I live in Northern VA, the capital of the data centers and it is easier to build one permit-wise than a tree house. also see provisions in OBBB
What counts towards a bullshit budget? Permitting is a drop in the bucket compared to construction costs.
This is a huge one. What Musk is looking for is freedom from land acquisition. Everything else is an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve. The land acquisition problem is out of his hands and he doesn't want to deal with politicians. He learned from building out the Memphis DC.
He "learned" by illegally poisoning black people
> an engineering and physics problem that he will somehow solve
no he won't
What ? This is Hacker News man. Talk substance. Not some rage baiting nonsense.
https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2025/05/27/elon-musks-memphi...
Thank you. This is really nasty. Boxtown residents should sue xAI and take them to court.
So freedom from law and regulation?
Well let's face it. Not all law and regulation is created equal. Look at Europe.
Where a random malicious president can't just hijack the government and giga-companies can't trivially lobby lawmakers for profits at the expense of citizens?
So why does he not build here in Europe then? Getting a permit for building a data center in Sweden is just normal industrial zoning that anyone can get for cheap, there is plenty of it. Only challenge is getting enough electricity.
I meant Europe is an example of how not to do regulation. The problem you just mentioned. If you get land easily electricity won't be available and vice versa.
Then maybe you should move here. We have in most cases well functioning regulations. Of course there are counter examples where it has been bad but data centers is not one of them. It is easy to get permits to build one.
Why is it an example? Can you cite any case where "regulation" trumpled the construction of a properly designed datacenter?
Or what you meant was "those poor billionaires can't do as they please with common resources of us all, and without any accountability"?
As a quick anecdote, there is a DC in construction in Portugal with a projected capacity of 1.2GW, powered by renewables.
> Not all law and regulation is created equal. Look at Europe.
You're spot on but you are not saying what you think you're saying)
Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.
Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
Every DC I’ve been in (probably around 20 in total) has been multi storey.
Skepticism is valid. The environmentalists came after dams too.
Sure, we can run the math on heat dissipation. The law of Stefan-Boltzman is free and open source and it application is high school level physics. You talk about 50 MW. You are going to need a lot of surface area to radiate that off at somewhere close to reasonable temperatures.
A Starlink satellite is mainly just receiving and sending data, the bare minimum of a data center-satellite's abilities; everything else comes on top and would be the real power drain.
Amazon’s new campus in Indiana is expected to use 2.2GW when complete. 50Mw is nothing, and that’s ignoring the fact that most of that power wouldn't actually be used for compute.
Starlink provides a service that couldn't exist without the satellite infrastructure.
Datacenters already exist. Putting datacenters in space does not offer any new capabilities.
This is the main point I think. I am very much convinced that SpaceX is capbable to put a datacenter into space. I am not convinced they can do it cheaper than building a datacenter on earth.
> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?
xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.
So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.
Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
I ran the math the last time this topic camps up
The short answer is that ~100m2 of steel plate at 1400C (just below its melting point) will shed 50MW of power in black body radiation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616#46093316
Which GPU runs at 1400C?
One made of steel presumably.
I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously that's going to impact efficiency.
Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre. It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea is.
Because 10K satellites have a FAR greater combined surface area than a single space-borne DC would. Stefan-Boltzman law: ability to radiate heat increase to the 4th power of surface area.
It's linear to surface area, but 4th power to temperature.
Are starlink satellites in sun synchronous orbits? Doesn't constant solar heating change the energy balance quite a bit?
50MW is on the small side for an AI cluster - probably less than 50k gpus.
if the current satellite model dissipates 5kW, you can't just add a GPU (+1kW). maybe removing most of the downlink stuff lets you put in 2 GPUs? so if you had 10k of these, you'd have a pretty high-latency cluster of 20k GPUs.
I'm not saying I'd turn down free access to it, but it's also very cracked. you know, sort of Howard Hughesy.
High latency to earth but low latency (potentially) to other satellites.
50MW might be one aisle of a really dense DC. A single rack might draw 120kW.
5kW means you can't even handle a single one of these[0], compared to a handful per rack on an earthbound data centre.
0. https://www.arccompute.io/solutions/hardware/gpu-servers/sup...
Starlink satellites also radiate a non-trivial amount of the energy they consume from their phased arrays
> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate.
This isn't quite true. It's very possible that the majority of that power is going into the antennas/lasers which technically means that the energy is being dissipated, but it never became heat in the first place. Also, 5KW solar power likely only means ~3kw of actual electrical consumption (you will over-provision a bit both for when you're behind the earth and also just for safety margin).
> Why is starlink possible and other computations are not?
Aside from the point others have made that 50 MW is small in the context of hyperscalers, if you want to do things like SOTA LLM training, you can't feasibly do it with large numbers of small devices.
Density is key because of latency - you need the nodes to be in close physical proximity to communicate with each other at very high speeds.
For training an LLM, you're ideally going to want individual satellites with power delivery on the order of at least about 20 MW, and that's just for training previous-generation SOTA models. That's nearly 5,000 times more power than a single current Starlink satellite, and nearly 300 times that of the ISS.
You'd need radiator areas in the range of tens of thousands of square meters to handle that. Is it theoretically technically possible? Sure. But it's a long-term project, the kind of thing that Musk will say takes "5 years" that will actually take many decades. And making it economically viable is another story - the OP article points out other issues with that, such as handling hardware upgrades. Starlink's current model relies on many cheap satellites - the equation changes when each one is going to be very, very expensive, large, and difficult to deploy.
> 10th (or worse) best AI company
You might only care about coding models, but text is dominating the market share right now and Grok is the #2 model for that in arena rankings.
Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things.
They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices.
Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
The answer to this is very very simple.
Think about the stock return over a period - its composed of capital gains and dividends.
Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher.
What does this mean? Less retained earnings / cashflows that can be re-invested.
Apple is the only one that will come out of this OK. The others will be destroyed for if they dont return cash, the cash balance will be discounted leading to a further reduction in the value of equity. The same thing that happened to Zuckerberg and Meta with the Metaverse fiasco.
Firms in the private sphere will go bust/acquired.
> Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher
This is not how corporate finance works. Capital gains and losses apply to assets. And only the most disciplined companies boost dividends in the face of decline—most double down and try to spend their way back to greatness.
It'll be a combination of advertising and subscription fees, and there will only be a few big winners.
Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here.
Microsoft is toast, short of a miracle. I'd bet against Office and Windows here. As Office goes down, it's going to take Windows down with it. The great Office moat is about to end. The company struggles, the stock struggles, Azure gets spun off (unlock value, institutional pressure), Office + Windows get spun off - the company splits into pieces. The LLMs are an inflection point for Office and Microsoft is super at risk, backwards regarding AI and they're slow. The OpenAI pursuit as it was done, was a gigantic mistake for Microsoft - one of the dumbest strategies in the history of tech, it left them with their pants down. Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be complacent.
Grok is very unlikely to make it (as is). The merger with SpaceX guarantees its death as a competitor to GPT/Gemini/Claude, it's over. Maybe they'll turn Grok into something useful to SpaceX. More likely they'll slip behind and it'll die rapidly like Llama. The merger is because they see the writing on the wall, this is a bailout to the investors (not named Elon) of xAI, as the forced Twitter rollup was a bailout for the investors of Twitter.
Claude is in a weird spot. What they have is not worth $300-$500 billion. Can they figure out how to build a lot more value out of what they have today (and get their finances sustainable), before the clock runs out? Or do they get purchased by Meta, Microsoft, etc.
OpenAI has to rapidly roll out the advertising model and get the burn rate down to meaningless levels, so they're no longer dependent on capital markets for financing (that party is going to end suddenly).
Meta is permanently on the outside looking in. They will never field an in-house competitor to GPT or Gemini that can persistently keep up. Meta doesn't know what it is or why it should be trying to compete with GPT/Gemini/Claude. Their failure (at this) is already guaranteed. They should just acquire GPT 4o and let their aging userbase on FB endlessly talk itself into the grave for the next 30 years while clicking ads.
If Amazon knew what they were doing (they don't right now), they would: immediately split retail + ads and AWS. The ad business ensures that the retail business will continue to thrive and would be highly lucrative. Then have AWS purchase Anthropic when valuations drop, bolt it on to AWS everything. Far less of an anti-trust issue than if what is presently known as Amazon attempted it here and now. Anthropic needs to build a lot on to itself to sustain itself and justify its valuation, AWS already has the answer to that.
If valuations plunge, and OpenAI is not yet sustainable, Microsoft should split itself into pieces and have the Windows-Office division purchase OpenAI as their AI option. It'd be their only path to avoiding anti-trust blocking that acquisition. As is Microsoft would not be allowed to buy OpenAI. Alternatively Microsoft can take a shot at acquiring Anthropic at some point - this seems likely given the internal usage going on at Redmond, the primary question is anti-trust (but in this case, Anthropic is viewed as the #3, so Microsoft would argue it bolsters competition with GPT & Gemini).
"Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here"
Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make products for the sake of it, else the technology is not accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core thing, along side superior marketing.
One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user tremendously for switching.
Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out where they can take advantage of the investments others have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.
Merging with SpaceX means they don't have to pay for their existence. Anyway they're probably positioned better than any other AI player except maybe Gemini.
I don’t follow why merging with SpaceX means they don’t have to pay for their existence. Someone does. Presumably now that is SpaceX. What is SpaceX’s revenue?
Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively unlimited money through the US Government, either via ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.
Plus government backstop. The federal government (especially the current one) is not going to let SpaceX fail.
Maybe not, but they might force it to sell at fire sale prices to another aerospace company that doesn't have the baggage.
xAI includes twitter? I thought twitter was just X?
xAI acquired twitter in 2025 as part of Musk's financial shell game (probably the same game he is playing with SpaceX/xAI now).
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
What (literally) on earth makes you say this? The arctic has excellent cooling and extremely poor sun exposure. Where would the energy come from?
A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic. Additionally anything terrestrial needs maintenance for e.g. clearing dust and snow off of the panels (a major concern in deserts which would otherwise seem to be ideal locations).
There are so many more considerations that go into terrestrial generation. This is not to deny the criticism of orbital panels, but rather to encourage a real and apolitical engineering discussion.
> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic.
Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.
It has been worked out. Just look at how big are ISS radiators and that they dissipate around 100kW then calculate cost of sending all that to space. And by that I mean it would be even more expensive that some of the estimates flying around
While personally I think it's another AI cash grab and he just wants to find some more customers for spacex, other thing is "you can't copyright infringe in space" so it might be perfect place to load that terabytes of stolen copyrighted material to train data sets, if some country suddenly decides corporation stealing copyright content is not okay any more
Maybe you can't copyright infringe in space, but it's still infringement when the result gets back to earth.
What in particular is wrong/misleading in the Starcloud whitepaper, then?
https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
In Table 1, the cost of cooling of a terrestrial data centre is listed as $7M. The cost of cooling in space is assigned a value of $0 with the claim:
"More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space"
My bold claim: The cost of cooling will not be $0. The cost of launching that cooling into space will also not be $0. The cost of maintaining that mechanically complex cooling in space will not be $0.
They then throw in enough unrealistic calculations later in the "paper" to show that they thought about the actual cost at least a little bit. Apparently just enough to conclude that it's so massive there's no way they're going to list it in the table. Table 1 is pure fantasy.
That row specifically says "chiller energy cost" which is 0
Previous discussions on HN: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390781
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667458
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43977188
I will not re-read them, but from what I recall from those threads is numbers don't make sense. Something like:
- radiators the multiple square kilometers in size, in space;
- lifting necessary payloads to space is multiples of magnitudes more than we have technology/capacity as the whole world now;
- maintanence nightmare. yeah you can have redundancy, but no feasable way to maintain;
- compare how much effort/energy/maintenance is required to have ISS or Tiangong space stations - these space datacenters sound ridiculous;
NB: I would be happy to be proven wrong. There are many things that are possible if we would invest effort (and money) into it, akin to JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" talk. Sounded incredible, but it was done from nearly zero to Moon landing in ~7 years. Though as much as I udnerstand - napkin math for such scale of space data centers seem to need efforts that are orders or magnitude more than Apollo mission, i.e. launching Saturn V for years multiple times per day. Even with booster reuse technology this seems literally incredible (not to mention fuel/material costs).
They do not at any point outline how cooling will be done, they simply say "it will be more efficient than chillers due to the larger delta T" which is incorrect because it's about dT not delta T
Probably this bit on page 4, which parent comment addresses: “More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space.”
(DTC) Datacentres take electricity and turn it into low grade heat e.g 60c water. Put them anywhere where you've either got excess (cheap) energy or where you can use the heat. Either is fine, both is great, but neither is both bad and current standard practice.
It's perfectly possible to put small data centres in city centres and pipe the heat around town, they take up very very little space and if you're consuming the heat, you don't need the noisy cooling towers (Ok maybe a little in summer).
Similarly if you stick your datacentre right next to a big nuclear power plant, nobody is even going to notice let alone care.
Resistive heating is a tremendously inefficient way to generate heat. Sometimes it's worth it if you get something useful in exchange (such as full spectrum light in the winter). But it's not all upsides.
Heat pumps are magic. They're something like 300% efficient. Each watt generates 3 watts of useful heat.
I share your enthusiasm about heat pumps, but I wonder what the efficiency of using waste heat is. Couldn't it be competitive with heat pumps? As it's a waste product, isn't it reasonable to also expect it to be more than 100% efficient?
Much more than 100% since the only energy you need to put in is for pumping the hot water around.
Its not inefficient if you were creating the heat anyway, its a completely free byproduct.
The energy economics in space are also a bit more complicated than usually thought. I think Starlink has been using Si cells instead of III-V-based ones, but in addition to lower output they also tend to degrade faster under radiation. I guess that's ok if the GPU is going to be toast in a few years anyway so you might as well de-orbit the whole thing. But that same solar cell on Earth will happily be producing for 40+ years.
Also the same issue with radiative cooling pops up for space solar cells - they tend to run way hotter than on Earth and that lowers their efficiency relative to what you could get terrestrially.
Its very simple, xAI needs money to win the AI race, so best option is to attach to Elon’s moneybank (spacex) to get cash without dilution
> win the AI race
I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean?
Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.
Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
Typically in capitalism, if there is any profit, the race is towards zero profit. The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly (or duopoly, or some other stable arrangement). I assume the latter is the goal, but that means burning through like 50%+ of american gdp growth just to be undercut by china.
Imo I would be extremely angry if I owned any spacex equity. At least nvidia might be selling to china in the short term... what's the upside for spacex?
> The alternative is a race to bankrupt all competitors at enormous cost in order to jack up prices and recoup the losses as a monopoly
I don't know of an instance of this happening successfully.
Amazon
Walmart? It's certainly more successful in physical markets
People keep saying this but it's simply untrue. AI inference is profitable. Openai and Anthropic have 40-60% gross margins. If they stopped training and building out future capacity they would already be raking in cash.
They're losing money now because they're making massive bets on future capacity needs. If those bets are wrong, they're going to be in very big trouble when demand levels off lower than expected. But that's not the same as demand being zero.
those gross profit margins aren't that useful since training at fixed capacity is continually getting cheaper, so there's a treadmill effect where staying in business requires training new models constantly to not fall behind. If the big companies stop training models, they only have a year before someone else catches up with way less debt and puts them out of business.
Only if training new models leads to better models. If the newly trained models are just a bit cheaper but not better most users wont switch. Then the entrenched labs can stop training so much and focus on profitable inference
If they really have 40-60% gross margins, as training costs go down, the newly trained models could offer the same product at half the price.
It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens first, the discovery of such a model, or the bubble bursting.
A significant number of AI companies and investors are hoping to build a machine god. This is batshit insane, but I suppose it might be possible. Which wouldn't make it any more sane.
But when they say, "Win the AI race," they mean, "Build the machine god first." Make of this what you will.
On the edge of my seat waiting to see what hits us first, a massive economic collapse when the hype runs out, or the Torment Nexus.
It really seems like the market has locked in on one of those two things being a guaranteed outcome at this point.
It’s a graft to keep people distracted and allow for positioning as we fall off the end of the fossil energy boom.
Being too far ahead for competitors to catch up, similar to how google won browsers, amazon won distribution, etc
It’s a framing device to justify the money, the idea being the first company (to what?) will own the market.
Remember how he argued for Tesla’s Solarcity acquisition because solar roofs?
Data centers in space are the same kind of justification imo.
Solar roofs are much more practical to be honest.
Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?
There's a synergy effect here - Tesla sells you a solar roof and car bundle, the roof comes without a battery (making it cheaper) and the car now gets a free recharge whenever you're home (making it cheaper in the long term).
Of course that didn't work out with this specific acquisition, but overall it's at least a somewhat reasonable idea.
It's obviously a pretty weird thing for a car company to do, and is probably just a silly idea in general (it has little obvious benefit over normal solar panels, and is vastly more expensive and messy to install), but in principle it could at least work, FSOV work. The space datacenter thing is a nonsensical fantasy.
In comparison to datacenters in space yes. Solar roofs are already a profitable business, just not likely to be high growth. Datacenters in space are unlikely to ever make financial sense, and even if they did, they are very unlikely to show high growth due to continuing ongoing high capital expenses inherent in the model.
For an electrification company.
> xAI needs money to win the AI race
Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.
> Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.
Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world. So it is worth all the effort to be the first.
I _think_ the idea is that the first one to hit self improving AGI will, in a short period of time, pull _so_ far ahead that competition will quickly die out, no longer having any chance to compete economically.
At the same time, it'd give the country controlling it so much economic, political and military power that it becomes impossible to challenge.
I find that all to be a bit of a stretch, but I think that's roughly what people talking about "the AI race" have in mind.
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
That may be the plan, but this is also a great way for GDPR's maximum fine, based on global revenue, to bite on SpaceX's much higher revenue. And without any real room for argument.
I think he has rocket company that needs more work.
Sufficient hype funds more work for his rocket company.
The more work they have the faster they can develop the systems to get to Mars. His pet project.
I really think it's that simple.
Starlink and Falcon 9 have been an excellent pairing, Falcon 9 partially reusable rockets created a lot launch capacity and starlink filled the demand. Starship if it meets its goals will create more launch fully reusable supply by orders of magnitude, but there is not the demand for all that launch capacity. Starlink can take some of it but probably not all so they need to find a customer to fill it in order to build up enough to have the volume to eventually colonize mars.
Going to Mars is not a serious goal.
We can tell because it’s not being treated as a serious goal. 100% of the focus is on the big vroom vroom part that’s really exciting to kids who get particularly excited by things that go vroom, and approximately 0% of the focus is on developing all the less glamorous but equally essential components of a successful Mars mission, like making sure the crew stays healthy.
> colonize mars
Oh, that crap again.
Nobody colonizing Mars. Get real. The most likely outcome, is him landing on a cell when the full Epstein files come out.
The most likely outcome is that no one will be punished for anything in the Epstein files.
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power
It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)
Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
The only way I see this actually working given the resource requirement is delta-v style with in orbit resource extraction using robots. By transferring heat to asteroids in the shade of the solar panels at L1 or something.
https://share.google/uXWQyAp7a8nE03qoi
It’s funny how quickly the general public forgot about the “vacuum thermos”. (Perhaps more popular before StarBucks overran society).
Those flasks don’t have any space age insulating material - mainly just a vacuum…
Technology from 1892…
or perhaps as simple as saving xAI for himself as he prepares to offload rest of Twitter?
This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos is much lower and it’s the temperature difference which determines the rate of cooling.
"Radiate" is exactly what you have to do, and that is extremely slow. You need a huge area to dissipate the amount of power you are talking about.
Basically you concentrate the heat into a high emissivity high temperature material that’s facing deep space and is shaded. Radiators get dramatically smaller as temperature goes up because radiation scales as T⁴ (Stefan–Boltzmann). There are many cases in space where you need to radiate heat - see Kerbal Space Program
"High emissivity, high temperature" sounds good on paper, but to create that temperature gradient within your spacecraft the way you want costs a lot of energy. What you actually do is add a shit load of surface area to your spacecraft, give that whole thing a coating that improves its emissivity, and try your hardest to minimize the thermal gradient from the heat source (the hot part) throughout the radiator. Emissivity isn't going past 1 in that equation, and you're going to have a very hard time getting your radiator to be hotter than your heat source.
Note that KSP is a game that fictionalizes a lot of things, and sizes of solar panels and radiators are one of those things.
I have a vacuum thermos. I've been unimpressed with its ability to keep coffee hot.
Its not just cooling thats totally not worked out, its internal networking, its power management (what happens when its in darkness?) how do you certify servers for +/-10g vibration (https://www.ralspace.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Dynamics-and-vibration...)
What about gamma rays? there is a reason why "space hardened" microcontrollers are MIPS chips from the 90s on massive dies with a huge wedge of metal on it. You can't just take a normal 4micron die and yeet it into space and have done with it.
Then there is the downlink. If you want low latency, then you need to be in Low earth orbit. That means that you'll spend >40% of your time in darkness. So not only do you need to have a MAssive heat exchanger and liquid cooling loop, which is space rated, you need to have ?20mwhr of battery as well (also cooled/heated because swinging +/- 140 C every 90 minutes is not going to make them happy)
Then there is data consistency, is this inference only? or are we expecting to have a mesh network that can do whole "datacentre" cache coherence? because I have bad news for you if you're going to try that.
Its just complete and total bollocks.
utter utter bollocks.
You can reject the heat by shedding hot mass, but only once.
Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out the back.
Where will they go, nobody knows!
Depending on where they land, you can double the service you offer. AI computations coupled with rods from God.
When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.
Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! (are raining down on my house)
Preferibly directly onto indian electronics salvagers
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Unfortunately no. The arctic region is too cold and humid. You need way more energy to manage the cooling of a datacenter there than somewhere hotter.
AI sovereignty, not AI efficiency. Redesign AI chips with lower power density and higher thermal tolerances and you get more efficient radiation with some sacrifice in compute power. But you are outside the jurisdiction of every country.
Then you get people paying much more money to use less-tightly-moderated space-based AI rather than heavily moderated AI.
I think it's possibly more informative to look at what happened with SolarCity and Tesla and contemplate if there's not a similar dynamic here.
I used to really enjoy musk's talks when he was spooling up tesla. He was an engineer and obviously the world is missing what engineers see clearly.
But now looking back and accounting for the claims he made there's a pattern.
I saw this article:
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-...
that said... he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.
> he did jumpstart the EV industry.
This is widely believed (especially in the US, where, other than the Leaf, most early electric cars never launched), but honestly pretty dubious. The first real electric cars, with significant production:
2010 - Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Nissan Leaf
2011 - Smart electric, Volvo C30 electric, Ford Focus electric, BYD e6.
2012 - Renault Zoe (Renault launched a couple of other vehicles on the same platform ~2010, but they never saw significant production), Tesla Model S (Tesla had a prior car, the Roadster, but it never saw significant production).
2013 - VW eUP, eGolf (VW occasionally put out an electric Golf historically, going back to 1992, but again those were never produced in large quantities).
The big change ~2010 was around the economics of lithium ion batteries; they finally got cheap enough that everyone started pulling their concept designs and small-scale demonstration models into full production.
> he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us.
Talk to any former SpaceX or Tesla employee. They will clue you in that both were successful in spite of Elon, not because of him.
The Cybertruck was really the first product he saw to completion from his own design. And well...
I think you under appreciate him a bit here. No he's not a super genius. He's probably not even a good engineer. But he is a) a total a.hole and b) a tremendous bullshitter. There are circumstances in which you need such a person to succeed (see also Steve Jobs). He yelled at people for 10 years straight and he was crucial in facilitating capital to build these very capital intensive products. A regular smart person would absolutely not have succeeded, for these reasons.
> bullshitter
why is lying at the edge of committing fraud so respected?
I think Musk is backed into a corner financially. Most of his companies don't have that much revenue and their worth is mostly based on hope.
They might be closer to collapsing than most people think. It's not unheard of that a billionaires net worth drops to zero over night.
I think it's mostly financial reasons why they merged the companies, this space datacenter idea was born to justify the merge of SpaceX and xAI. To give investors hope, not to really do it.
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.
Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.
So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
There might be a lot of induced demand from starship. I’m sure defense is a big one.
No, but really, where will it come from?
If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a specific source of latent demand that is large enough to soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver, then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a business plan that’s been thought through as clearly as a $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.
“Defense” is not nearly specific enough to count as an answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the sun. Also, given enough input energy (the sun), active closed-cooling systems might be feasible.
https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...
But I really hope posts like this don't discourage whoever is investing in this. The problems are solvable, and someone is trying to solve them, that's all that matters. My only concern is the latency, but starlink seems to manage somehow.
Also, a matter of technicality (or so I've heard it said) is that the earth itself doesn't dissipate heat, it transforms or transfers entropy.
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
I feel like this is an incredibly fantastic goal-post-moving from the original announcement.
SpaceX: "we're going to put datacenters in space"
HN comments: "obviously we'll need to move human civilization into space first for this to make sense. checks out."
Can’t you heat exchange inside the satellite, and make one part of the satellite incredibly hot so that it radiates a lot and dissipates.
This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
Yes, but you need energy to pump heat, and that has an efficiency maximum (thx ~~Obama~~ Carnot), and radiative cooling scales with the ~4th power of the temperature, so it has to be really hot, and so it requires a lot of energy to "cool down" the already relatively cool side and use that "heat" to heat up the other side that's a thousand degree hotter.
All in all, the cooling system would likely consume more energy than the compute parts.
yes. it is how sats currently handle this. its actually exponentially effective too P = E S A T^4
requires a lot of weight (cooling fluid). requires a lot of materials science (dont want to burn out radiator). requires a lot of moving parts (sun shutters if your orbit ever faces the sun - radiator is going to be both ways).
so that sounds all well and good (wow! 4th power efficiency!) but it's still insanely expensive and if your radiator solution fucks up in any way (in famously easy to service environment space) then your entire investment is toast
now i havent run the math on cost or what elon thinks the cost is, but my extremely favorable back of hand math suggests he's full of it
Be careful with the math there. While a 4th power is awesome you got the Stefan-Boltzman constant to consider and that's on the order of 10^-8
Radiative power is really efficient for hot things but not so great when you're trying to keep things down to normal levels. Efficient for shedding heat from a sun but not so much for keeping a cpu from overheating...
Pet peeve:
T^4 is not exponential in T, it’s polynomial. For exponential, T must be in the exponent, e.g. 2^T or so.
Still, pretty effective.
Having said that, agree that Elon is full of it.
Sure but if it was a good idea we could do it on earth too and datacenters could stop gurgling a city worth of water
You can. This is how it is currently done, but it is not easy. It needs to have a large enough surface area to radiate the heat, and also be protected from the sun (as to not collect extra heat). For a data centre, think of an at least 1000m2 heat exchange panel (likely more to train a frontier model).
Good intuition, that is generally how radiators work in space.
You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.
>>This is just a question. I have no expertise at all with this.
On the similar lines, why can't one run a refrigerator in space?
You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.
yeah if you want a heat thruster
He goes on about putting a mass driver on the moon for ultra-low-cost space launches.
His plan here clearly hinges around using robots to create a fully-automated GPU manufacturing and launch facility on the moon. Not launching any meaningful number from earth.
Raises some big questions about whether there are actually sufficient materials for GPU manufacture on the moon... But, whatever the case, the current pitch of earth-launches that the people involved with this "space datacenter" thing are making is a lie. I think it just sounds better than outright saying "we're going to build a self-replicating robot factory on the moon", and we are in the age of lying.
If any single country tried to create a whole production chain to single-handedly manufacture modern computer equipment it would be on the order of decades to see any result. Doing it on the moon is just not realistic this century, maybe the next one. Although i don't think the economics would ever work out.
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
That's wise.
However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:
The materialist take is that his plan is to eventually over-value and then trade on his company valuations, and also have another merger lined up for future personal financial bailouts.
apocalyptic space twitter with satellites shaped like whales that drop from the sky would have been cooler.
All of this and more.
For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.
I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.
Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.
Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.
Starship is fueled with methane (natural gas) and liquid oxygen which aren't toxic. It does produce a lot of CO2 which is a problem with lots of flights.
IIRC the methane is produced at launch site with considerable pollution
Does that emit more than Elon's terrestrial data centers powered by natural gas, per unit of compute?
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
> And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
So your hot thing is radiating directly onto the next hot thing over, the one that also needs to cool down?
> aka fancy air conditioning pumps
Yeah, pumps, tubes, and fluids are some of the worst things to add to a satellite. It's probably cheaper to use more radiators.
Maybe it's possible to make something economical with Peltier elements. But it's still not even a budget problem yet, it's not plainly not viable.
> getting quite good here with nanotechnology
Small features and fractal surfaces are useless here.
Peltiers and heat pipes don't remove heat, they just move it. You still need the radiator.
My dude, heat pipes were invented for satellites and there’s people walking around with piezo pumps in their phones these days. We’re getting close.
Peltiers generate a lot of heat to get the job done so even though electricity is pretty much free, probably not a sure bet.
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.
Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
> some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot
Hillary (he features on the NZ Five Dollar note) was one of those guys who does things for no good reason. He also went to both poles. This only tells us that it is indeed possible, but not that it's desirable or will become routine.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
Hence the fancy air conditioning pumps
... on satellites?
Yes, that’s what we’re talking about. Data centers in space.
You put the cold side of the phase change on the internal cooling loop, step up the external cooling loop as high temp as you can and then circulate that through the radiators. You might even do this step up more than once.
Imagine the data center like a box, you want it to be cold inside, and there’s a compressor, you use to transfer heat from inside to outside, the outside gets hot, inside cold. You then put a radiator on the back of the box and radiate the heat to the darkness of space.
This is all very dependent on the biggest and cheapest rockets in the world but it’s a tradeoff of convenience and serviceability for unlimited free energy.
Why not use the unlimited free energy on terrestrial data centers then? You can use solar power as we speak, no?
This makes zero sense.
> Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
My car doesn't spend too much time driving in vacuum, does yours?
Engine bays have a lot of design go into where to keep heat and where to get rid of it. You can look up thermal coatings and ceramics etc.
Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again? A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing through it?
Seems like quite a massive difference to ignore.
Let's just hope the person you are responding to isn't Elon Musk!
I wouldn't say that roadster isn't doing much driving but dang is it drifting!
> You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.
I don’t remember the difference from my science classes, isn’t This the same thing essentially?
The other two methods of heat transfer apart from radiation are conduction (through “touch”, adjacent molecules, eg from the outside of a chicken on the BBQ to the inside) and convection (through movement, eg cold air or water flowing past).
quantum computers on the sun!
Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue? Do they not understand the laws of thermodynamics, physics, etc?
Sure, space is cold. Good luck cooling your gear with a vacuum.
Don't even get me started on radiation, or even lack of gravity when it comes to trying to run high powered compute in space. If you think you are just going to plop a 1-4U server up there designed for use on earth, you are going to have some very interesting problems pop up. Anything not hardened for space is going to have a very high error/failure rate, and that includes anything socketed...
> Not going to read the article, because Data centers in space = DOA is common sense to me, however, did the article really claim cooling wasn't an issue?
No. Nearly everyone that talks about data centers in space talks about cooling. The point of this article was to talk about other problems that would remain even if the most commonly talked about problems were solved.
It says:
> But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy.
and then talks about some of those other issues.
Not disagreeing with you at all: that physics fact always come up. My honest question is: if it's a perfect thermos, what does, for example, the ISS do with the heat generated by computers and humans burning calories? The ISS is equipped with a mechanism to radiate excess heat into space? Or is the ISS slowly heating up but it's not a problem?
Massive radiators. In this photo[0], all of the light gray panels are thermal radiators. Note how they are nearly as large as the solar panels, which gives you an idea about the scale needed to radiate away 3-12 people's worth of heat (~1200 watts) + the heat generated by equipment.
[0] https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2021e064215_alt/jsc2...
The ISS is designed to emit 126kW of heat radiation between the active cooking systems and the solar array cooling system.
Which is less than a single rack of GPUs.
I agree, all the good papers definitely talk about custom designed radiators being used on the dark sides of data center in space.
Let me google that for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has giant heat sinks[1]. Those heat sinks are necessary for just the modest heat generated on the ISS, and should give an idea of what a sattelite full of GPU's might require...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro...
The ISS has MASSIVE radiators. Most of its volume is radiator. 900 cubic meters of space 2500 square meters of radiator.
The TL;DR is they radiate it into space via large, high surface area arms that stick out of the station.
It will be the communications, not the compute part.
One man able to put a data center worth of mass in orbit is one man able to crash a datacenter worth of mass into Earth anywhere he wants.
Not a given. Re enter the atmosphere. Sure. Avoid vaporization? Much harder problem.
I think it's actually the other way around, satellites need to be specifically designed to burn up fast in the atmosphere. See for example the warnings about space debris from Chinese satellites not designed with this in mind.
There is some evidence to suggest that spacex knows how to reenter an object without burning it up.
The engineering overlap between between a small object designed for reentry and a flying (crashing...) warehouse is not a circle.
Once upon a time there was a bonkers "rods from god" mass bomb idea, but that didn't work either.
Sometimes without even meaning to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/spacex-cbc-debris-s...
A glaring lack of oceans to boil
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
> a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
Not necessarily. There are many modern thermos "cups" that are just a regular cup, except with two layers of glass and a vacuum. Even the top is open all the time. (e.g. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/passerad-double-wall-glass-8054... )
It's still good enough to keep your coffee hot for an entire day.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.
In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).
Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.
All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.
This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.
What do you think about droplet radiators? E.g. using a ferrofluid with magnetic containment for capture and enough spare on board to last five years of loss due to occasional splashes?
First, thanks for your knowledgeable input.
Second, are you saying that we basically need to have a radiator as big (approximately) as the solar panels?
That is a lot, but it does sound manageable, in the sense that it approximately doubles what we require anyway for power.
So, not saying that it’s easy or feasible, but saying that cooling then seems “just” as difficult as power, not insurmountably more difficult. (Note that the article lists cooling, radiation, latency, and launch costs as known hard problems, but not power.)
> 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C
What is this figure based on?
> it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before
That is the goal of Starship though. The ISS has a mass of 400 ton, the goal is to need only two cheap launches of Starship v4 for that.
> It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.
Please, no!
musk is always up to something but remarkably people still eat this stuff up - remarkable to watch!
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.
There should be some temperature where incoming radiation (sunlight) balances outgoing radiation (thermal IR). As long as you're ok with whatever that temperature is at our distance from the sun, I'd think the only real issue would be making sure your satellite has enough thermal conductivity.
No, but protecting x/xAI from bankruptcy by linking it to the most promising company in Musk's portfolio does. You just need a justification.
This is while they try to find a solution to earn money with it.
As others point out this is a bad idea.
Asside from the other excellent comments on power consumption, cooling and radiation. One point I didn't see being made in the comments much is maintenance costs.
Now I don't find myself in the facility of a data center often in daily life, however I do know that medium to big data centers require 24/7 hardware replacement. I believe this is what those 5 guys with the bikes and scooters are doing in every data center. That would be very difficult, near impossible in space (with the current space fairing infrastructure).
This sentence proves the author has no ability for logical thinking: Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
I too don't think it's currently a sensible solution. But the author completely unable to make a proper case. For instance, just to refute that one claim, there are many reasons to do it in space even at an cost.
Space-based data centers provide an off-world backup that is immune to Earth-specific disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, or grid collapses. Servers in orbit are physically isolated from terrestrial threats, making them safe from riots, local warfare, or physical break-ins.
Moving infrastructure to space solves local community disputes by removing the strain on residential power grids and freeing up land for housing or nature. Space data centers do not deplete Earth’s freshwater supply for cooling, unlike terrestrial centers which consume billions of gallons annually.
Solar panels in orbit can access high-intensity sunlight 24 hours a day without interference from clouds, night, or the atmosphere.
Data stored in space can exist outside of national borders, protecting it from seizure, censorship, or the legal jurisdiction of unstable governments. Data transmission can be faster in space because light travels roughly 30% faster in a vacuum than it does through fiber optic cables.
Processing data directly in orbit is necessary for satellites and future space stations to avoid the delay and cost of beaming raw data back to Earth
While it’s true that there are no floods or earthquakes in space it’s not exactly a safe place to be. Radiation and cosmic rays become a much greater threat. Shielding provided by the atmosphere would have to be replaced.
You also underestimate the cooling problem. The fact that space is cold doesn’t mean it’s easy to cool things off in space. On earth the main cooling strategy is to transfer heat through direct contact and move the hot stuff away. Be it air or water, as you mentioned. In space your only option is to radiate heat away. And that’s while half of you is under intense sunlight.
I think you also undersell the thread of warfare in space. Sure, a guy with Molotov can’t get you space data center but we’ve had satellite shot down. So maybe not every war is a threat but, say China or Russia (or other space-faring nation) could take care of a satellite if absolutely needed.
National seizures are also still a threat. If only being ousted national borders was such a great defense we’d see some data centers in the sea by now.
So being in space is immune to some of the known problems but also comes with a whole lot of novel issues, not solved at scale yet. And so far I haven’t seen any sufficiently detailed proposed solutions to even consider the trade of known problems with readily available solutions for new issues with lots of unknowns.
They may well avoid terrestrial threats by having them in space, but then they become subject to different threats such as solar storms, high energy cosmic rays, space debris collisions etc.
I think the main reason to host them in space is to escape Earth jurisdictions, but even that is dubious as there will be people involved that reside on the Earth.
The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
Last but not least, wtf would you even want to do it?
There is zero benefit, non nada.
> sure space is cold
Even this isn't true. It's ~120 degC in daylight in LEO. It only gets cold in the shade, but a solar powered data center is pretty useless in the shade.
The solar labels are in the sun. Behind them they are in the shade.
In close proximity, and connected to metal structures radiating & conducting heat at 120 degrees. You still have to expel that heat somehow, and route it around the spacecraft core.
> The really crazy thing is you don't need to know more then basic (non Hollywood) physics to know how dump this is
And yet journalists at major institutions have been repeating Musk's claims with very little skepticism ("xAI and SpaceX are merging to bring data centers to space").
I believe you're better served by editorials for opinion, journalism should be comparatively rigorous. "Musk says" is not "plans/hopes"
That sounds like what journalists usually do. They are reporters, and rarely have any real knowledge of what they report.
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
It sounds hard but it shouldn't not make sense.
1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
Make sense now?
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
Really seems silly to think that the guy with $800 billion is spending most of his time maximizing his money.
He probably have 700 billion in loans and need to pay rent
Welcome to billionares. If they weren't obsessed with "number go up" over any other consideration, they wouldn't be billionares.
Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.
> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.
There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant regular x86 years ago, that's true.
I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up, and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.
> You are confidently incorrect.
No, he's not. Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
> AWST: So, NASA does not require SpaceX to use radiation-hardened computer systems on the Dragon?
John Muratore: No, as a matter of fact NASA doesn't require it on their own systems, either. I spent 30 years at NASA and in the Air Force doing this kind of work. My last job was chief engineer of the shuttle program at NASA, and before that as shuttle flight director. I managed flight programs and built the mission control center that we use there today.
On the space station, some areas are using rad-hardened parts and other parts use COTS parts. Most of the control of the space station occurs through laptop computers which are not radiation hardened.
> Q: So, these flight computers on Dragon – there are three on board, and that's for redundancy?
A: There are actually six computers. They operate in pairs, so there are three computer units, each of which have two computers checking on each other. The reason we have three is when operating in proximity of ISS, we have to always have two computer strings voting on something on critical actions. We have three so we can tolerate a failure and still have two voting on each other. And that has nothing to do with radiation, that has to do with ensuring that we're safe when we're flying our vehicle in the proximity of the space station.
I went into the lab earlier today, and we have 18 different processing units with computers in them. We have three main computers, but 18 units that have a computer of some kind, and all of them are triple computers – everything is three processors. So we have like 54 processors on the spacecraft. It's a highly distributed design and very fault-tolerant and very robust.
[1] - https://aviationweek.com/dragons-radiation-tolerant-design
> Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
Those are not independent facts. They put the hardware inside, behind the radiation shielding they use to keep the astronauts safe. It's why regular old IBM laptops work on the Space Station too. That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget if you use it on these satellites.
SpaceX, which prefers COTS components when it can use them, still went with AMD Versal chips for Starlink. Because that kind of high performance, small process node hardware doesn't last long in space otherwise (phone SoC-based cubesats in LEO never lasted more than a year, and often only a month or so).
> They put the hardware inside,
Which is exactly how you'd do a hypothetical dc in space. Come on, you're arguing for the sake of arguing. CotS works. This is not an issue.
> That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget
SpX is already leading in upmass by a large margin. Starship improves mass to orbit. Again, this is a "solved" issue.
There are other problems in building space DCs. Rad hardening is not one of them. AI training is so fault tolerant already that this was never an issue.
Where did you hear this?
When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.
They are not. xAI/SpaceX is talking about millions of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer, and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.)
Then they work backwards, trying to figure out some economic engine to make it happen. "Data centers" are (A) in-vogue for investment right now and (B) vaguely plausible, at least compared to having a space-casino.
That's not fair! Sometimes the ideas come from Snow Crash, which gave us the Metaverse because Zuckerberg wanted to cut a guy in half with a katana from a motorcycle.
Wait is that why they didn't put legs on anyone?
Wow, now you say it, that finally makes sense. Especially given it looked stupid and all the other VR chat solutions could already do legs.
It also gave us Mechanical Turk and microdrones!
This idea came from musk wanting to fold his X and xAI investments in with his (likely successful) spaceX IPO.
Yeah, if he gets more SpaceX shares in exchange for the xAI garbage shares then he wins, because the SpaceX shares will sell well.
He can also hide his garbage shares behind a too big to fail, essential for national security, business.
Also he can launder government funding for his AI company now
I wouldn’t credit science fiction for much of this.
It appears to have come out of a crack pipe.
Can you smoke ketamine?
> Can you smoke ketamine?
Apparently [1]. But "when ketamine is heated, its chemical structure degrades, reducing its potency."
[1] https://innervoyagerecovery.com/can-you-smoke-ketamine/
(Going to go ahead and VPN to my home connection from this airport Wi-fi.)
In space, ketamine smokes you.
I am surprised the space casino hasn't been done to be honest. Or some kind of space resort. I guess we are stepping across the stepping stones now, with private space flights, and private space fairing companies. Maybe it is just a matter of time before the Crystal Palace sees its first billionare clients.
He is very influenced by The Culture of Iain Banks. They're really good sci-fi... and describe a hedonistic world where machines do the hard thinking and bidding of the biologicals.
https://recommentions.com/elon-musk/books/culture-by-iain-ba...
https://www.vox.com/culture/413502/iain-banks-culture-series...
https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/billionaire-elon-musk-say-tha...
> Musk pointed to The Culture series by Iain M. Banks as his best “imagining” of this world. The science fiction novels depict a utopian future where citizens can have virtually anything they want thanks to AI—making money obsolete and leaving citizens free to spend their time doing whatever they love.
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
That is possible because DOGE and their comrades gutted the SEC and indirectly FINRA like a fish. The government is run by confidence men running crypto scams.
That’s how the CFO of OpenAI can essentially say “we need a Federal bailout”, and then turn around and say “lol just joking”.
[checks today's bitcoin price]
Oh.
Is it below the level where mining and blockchain updates become uneconomic yet?
Your dad can’t tell the difference.
If they get 3/10 things right, and 60 Minutes highlights those in the next interview, they’re set!
> above any earthly government
Anti satellite weapons are a thing. Besides, the more vulnerable part becomes you as a person rather than the equipment. There's no space colony yet, and even if there is, the supplies can be easily held hostage by an earthly government too.
I mean definitely, and they're not shy about admitting it. They see cool stuff in imagination-land, think it's cool, and work to make it a reality. Many people have worked to make the fantastical things shown in Star Trek.
We're about as close as we have ever been to a holo-deck with VR/AR right now, but it is notable that it is still a fringe technology. I think basically no one cares about space data centres except the rule of cool enthusiasts in the technosphere.
well, don't forget, freeside's initial moneymaker was a datahaven for less-reputable banks!
A lot more. Everyone is chasing scifi ideas, ridiculous. This shows that even people with high IQ lack fantasy/imagination and creativity. They are intelligent robots.
So whenever I see here or anywhere else that your ideas mean nothing I just laugh at it. Of course, these come from people who are bland, doesn't have any imagination and they are not creative at all at all, but they have brute force, which is money.
Write some books with good ideas then so future human-robots will be inspired to make your dreams into reality.
Unfortunately, these guys are only excited about building the Torment Nexus.
"It's only Torment™ if you aren't a double-digit shareholder!"
Stole Grok from Heinlein. At least it’s a good heuristic for people-I-don’t-have-to-take-seriously.
More likely, stole grok from nerds who learned grok from Heinlein.
Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.
1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.
2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.
3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.
As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.
A few additional items to rebut the lack of info in this Article:
- SpaceX just requested a license to launch up to a million satellites.
- the satellites already have some incredible anti collision software, which I believe Elon has now open sourced.
- the cost to launch 1 kg to space has dropped by a factor of 10 in the past few years and is currently less than $1000. It's perfectly reasonable to estimate that over the next 10 years the cost could drop by another factor of 10, if not more, particularly if the heavy rockets are reusable.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/31/spacex-seeks-federal-appro...
2. https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
3. https://www.netizen.page/2025/05/cost-per-kilogram-to-low-ea...
Edit: added item 3
Elon has open sourced them, or the people at SpaceX who actually know or understand something did?
3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)
As the focus here is solely on the US, and the comments focus too much on the impossibility of heat dissipation, I want to include some information to broaden the perspective.
- In the EU, the ASCEND study conducted in 2024 by Thales Alenia Space found that data center in space could be possible by 2035. Data center in space could contribute to the EU's Net-Zero goal by 2050 [1]
- heat dissipation could be greatly enhanced with micro droplet technology, and thereby reducing the required radiator surface area by the factor of 5-10
- data center in space could provide advantages for processing space data, instead of sending them all to earth. - the Lonestar project proved that data storage and edge processing in space (moon, cislunar) is possible.
- A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
I think the hybrid architecture could provide decisive advantages, especially when designed for AI inference workloads,
[1] https://ascend-horizon.eu/
> micro droplet technology
Intentionally causing Kessler Syndrome?
> A hybrid architecture could dramatically change the heat budget: + optical connections reduce heat + photonic chips (Lightmatter and Q.ANT) + processing-in-memory might reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
It would also make ground-based computation more efficient by the same amount. That does nothing to make space datacenters make sense.
Kessler syndrome is only a problem if the satellites are in LEO. They don't have to be.
They do have to be if they want to be approved by the FCC.
And btw Kessler syndrome applies to any orbital band. You've got the logic backwards. Kessler syndrome is usually only considered a threat for LEO because that's where most of the satellites are. But if you're throwing million(s) of satellites into orbit, it becomes an issue at whatever orbital height you pick.
https://starlink.com/updates/stargaze
> reduce energy requirement by 10-50 times
This is only relevant to the compute productivity (how much useful work it can produce), but it's irrelevant to the heat dissipation problem. The energy income is fundamentally limited by the solar facing area (x 1361 W/m^2). So the energy output cannot exceed it, regardless useful signals or just waste heat. Even if we just put a stone there, the equilibrium temperature wouldn't be any better or worse.
There are plenty of legit concerns here about e.g. the launch externalities which are actually greater than the launch costs themselves, i.e. climate impact to future generations.
However one flaw in this critique is that is only looks at the cost of ground-based solar panels and not their overall scalability. That is, manufacturing cost is far from the only factor. There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
When we really consider the challenges of deploying orders of magnitude more terrestrial solar, it really requires a more detailed and specific critique of the orbital vision. Positive includes near continuous solar exposure (in certain orbits) and no water requirements.
Much has been said of cooling but remember, there is a lot of literal space between the satellites for radiative cooling fins. It is envisioned they would network via optical links, and each mini satellite would be roughly on the order of a desktop GPU (not a whole data center rack). The vision is predicated on leveraging a ton of space for lots of mini satellites on the order of a Dell desktop tower. The terrestrial areas that are really cold are also not that great for solar exposure.
Personally I don't know how it will play out but the core concern I have about making these kinds of absolutist predictions is they make weak assumptions about the sustainable scalability of terrestrial power. And that is definitely the case here in that it only looks at the manufacturing cost of solar.
> There is also the need for real estate in areas with good sun exposure that also have sufficient fresh water supply for cleaning.
Solar panels are 20x more efficient than growing corn for ethanol. Swap out some of those 30 million acres of ethanol corn fields (in the US) and you'll have more energy than you need.
More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Very confused by this plan. Data centers on Earth are struggling with how to get rid of waste heat. It's really, really hard to get rid of waste heat in space. That seems to be about the worst possible place to put a data center.
It’s a distraction as they suck out as much value from Tesla as possible before the music stops and they go bust. There are a few really big IPOs this year including SpaceX, which will likely trigger significant market volatility.
yes, tesla, famously the worst performing car manufacturer with the worst profit margins, is definitely going bust any day now
Here's some context: Tesla, BYD, and Xiaomi Are Playing Different Games https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/tesla-byd-and-xiaomi-are-pl...
Clearly 200 forward P/E and three consecutive quarters of missed earning is a sign of profitability.
It's a stock worth $50-60 with generous valuation. The premium is the Elon bullshit and grift. That isn't gonna last forever.
That's not Elon's problem. He's an ideas guy. Data centers in space is definitely an idea.
Indeed. I would go so far as to assert that, of all the ideas that have ever been proposed in the history of humanity, data centres in space is most certainly one of them.
Just ask this scientician.
Uhhhh
Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
> Yeah he only micromanages (look at his old blog) every detail he has time for at an extremely successful aerospace engineering company, just an ideas guy.
Have you ever spoken to someone who works at SpaceX? I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company.
The overwhelming consensus is that - in meetings, you nod along and tell Elon "great idea". Immediately after you get back to real engineering and design things such that they make sense.
The folks working there are under no delusion that he has any business being involved in rocket science, it's fascinating that the general public doesn't see it that way.
Or you are actively trying to have the meetings when you are sure he cannot be present because he keeps derailing them.
Any cool kid in uni has had the same views as you do for ten years.
What do you and them know that the countless extremely successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do not?
https://erik-engheim.medium.com/is-elon-musk-just-a-sales-gu...
> What do you and them know that the countless extremely successful engineers who actually worked with Elon do not?
Did you read my comment?
"I have multiple friends in the industry, who have taken a trip through the company."
I am literally referring to extremely successful engineers who have worked directly with Elon.
I'm going to need more than a puff piece on some random Elon stan's medium page to outweigh what I've heard from my friends.
Why are they doing any better than any other firm then? Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
> Why are they doing any better than any other firm then?
Any other firm, you mean like the bloated and bureaucratic NASA/JPL/defense contractor madhouse? That's not much competition.
> Why has Tesla been successful? Why is xAI pretty similar in terms of approach? My idea has less variables than yours. It also doesn't fly with his tendency to fire people.
Your "idea" (statement) is that his companies are successful due to his micromanagement. In reality, they're successful in spite of it. Like all impactful engineering institutions, there are incredibly talented people working at the "bottom" levels of these companies that hold the whole thing together.
There's a good bit of irony here in your thought that he'd fire people that didn't agree with him or disobeyed him. From what I've heard, he lacks the technical rigor to even understand how what was implemented differs from his totally awesome and cool, off the cuff, reality adjacent ideas.
The myth of the supergenius CEO has real potential to influence investors, beyond that, the hard engineering is up to the engineers. Period. SpaceX wouldn't have gotten past o-ring selection with Elon at the engineering helm.
> NASA/JPL/defense contractor
Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
> Perhaps learn to look around the world. Europe has nothing, China is working on copying. New Zealand has RocketLab but looks like they've sold out to the states and is only for small payloads yet.
And which of those is also an American institution, with American educated employees and American cultural values, operating in an American legal and business framework?
Pretending NZ is a relevant comparison point is laughable. I bet SpaceX is also doing better than the 5th grade STEM class down the street!
Russia would've been a much better comparison given the history of the world we live in, but still not apples to apples.
Shedding the very slow process of “legacy” defense/aerospace companies, taking more risks, moving faster, accepting some setbacks etc does not mean you need to go full Musk. There is a middle ground.
Have you ever worked at a company? Was how profitable the company was directly related to how high-functioning it was? Not in my experience.
The same reason why Microsoft was able to kick everybody else out of the PC operating system and office software sectors: everybody else was even less competent.
I always felt that Microsoft's winning move was to be consistently mediocre. They just waited until competitors screwed up. Now they're following in IBMs or Intel's footsteps - concentrating everything on the enterprise market and slowly dying.
Bill Gates was also pretty good
I have heard similar things
Very confused by this plan.
How about now? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3ex92557jo
Well this explains why, but does not answer how to get rid of excessive heat in space.
What kind of the problem you're talking about compared to existing satellites? That is, all existing satellites generate power, and need to dissipate that power, and most of it goes to waste heat, and the satellites somehow do that successfully - what is the specific problem you're talking about, which can't be solved by the same means?
The numbers matter. The thermal budget a satellite is an tightly controlled thing. Large modern ones are in the order of a few to a couple of 10s of kilowatts, so something like a few to several low 10s of modern GPU compute power. Even with thousands of yet to be designed or launched satellites, it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC, plus it is in SAPCE for some reason, so everything is more expensive for lots of reasons.
> it's going to have trouble competing with even a single current DC
This looks like a valid argument to me, yes. Elon mentioned 1,000,000 satellites - I'm thinking about 3rd version of Starlink as a typical example, 2 tons, 60 satellites per Starship launch, 16,000 Starship launches for the constellation, comparing with 160 launches per year of today's Falcon 9...
The argument about problems of dissipating heat still stands - I don't see a valid counterargument here. Also "SAPCE" problem looks different from the point of view of this project - https://www.50dollarsat.info/ . Basically, out launch costs go way down, and quality of electronics and related tech today on Earth is high enough to work on LEO.
Even the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.
So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.
The ISS's radiators weigh thousands of kilograms to radiate around 70 KW. He's talking about building data centers in space in the GW range.
Assuming he built this in LEO (which doesn't make sense because of atmospheric drag), and the highest estimates for what starship could one day deliver to LEO (200 metric tons), and only 1 metric ton of radiators per 100KW, that's 50 launches just to carry up the radiators.
Are there many of those current satellites running gpus and actually generating lots of heat?
Principally speaking, as much energy as satellite receives from solar panels it needs to send away - and often a lot of it is in the form of heat. So, the question is, how much energy is received in the first place. We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS, so in principal - in principal - we know how to do this kind of scale per satellite. In practice we perhaps will have more smaller satellites which together aggregate the compute to the necessary lever and power to the corresponding level.
> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS
It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.
And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
I mean you have this around the wrong way.
The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing density on communication satellites, if we could dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue they would have like triple the capacity and could just drop everything back to the US (like their fans think they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to a ground station usually in the same country as the source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.
I have actually argued this from the other side, and I reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.
IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its heavy again, and several space engineering types want to slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems to be preferred.
I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then other, better people step in to actually do it. Also triple the time he says it will take to solve the problem.
And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.
It’s a vacuum
Vacuum being so famous for not conducting heat that we use it to keep our coffee hot
which is why the whole idea of data centers in space is ridiculous.
I'm glad to realize we're in violent agreement, I thought you were implying cooling would be easy due to the vacuum!
It can be solved with radiator fins and cold plates but yeah, it’s not an easy task.
Well the issue is that a lot of people believe that space is cold. If you will ask Google/Gemini what is a temperature of space, it will tell you:
The average temperature of deep space is approximately -270.45°C or 2.73 Kelvin), which is just above absolute zero. This baseline temperature is set by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiatio...
Which is absolute nonsense, because vacuum has no temperature.
Vacuum does have a temperature; it has a blackbody temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation
It has nothing to do with the movements of atoms, but just with the spectrum of photons moving through it. It means that eventually, any object left in space will reach that temperature. But it will not necessarily do it quickly, which is what you need if you're trying to cool something that is emitting heat.
That's not how it works. Two bodies are in thermal equilibrium if there's no heat transfer between them: that's the zeroth law of thermodynamics. If you're colder than 2.73K in deep space, you will absorb the heat from the Cosmic Microwave Background. If you're hotter, you will irradiate heat away. So it does have a temperature.
Well it isn't a perfect vacuum and it does have a temperature. But temperature is only a part of the story, just like how you go hypothermic a lot faster in 50 degree water than in 50 degree air.
I saw a news personality say that space is cold and that solves a big problem with datacenters as justification for why it made sense.
Space is cold because there isn't anything there.
There is also no matter to wick the heat away.
but if you did use thermometer in space it would eventual read 2.73 kelvin right? so whats the issue? and also for a space based server it would have to deal with the energy coming from the sun
Yes and no.
If you had a thermometer that had no heat generation then yes.
If you have a resistor or other heat generating circuit then you need to have the needed surface area to radiate the heat away. If you don't, it will heat up. It's a rate problem.
There is no matter.
It's cold there because there isn't anything there.
So there is nothing to conduct or convect the heat away.
It's like a giant vacuum insulated thermos.
Is putting data centers in thermos' a good idea?
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?
plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
Why did you say "eventually" in your original post? That answers your question.
It's a rate problem
what thermometer would you use to measure the temperature of space?
Thermocouples
I'm not a scientist but i am also sure it will be fucking hard to dissipate heat in a vacuum
Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about 20% of the mass budget.
The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
I think what many people miss is that energy became far less location dependent if you put compute next to its generation. The latency for token generation is not so important. So the ratios between energy consumed, bandwidth and latency would in theory favour building dark token factories in remote but optimal locations. But i guess construction and logistics are an issue.
One way to work around the heat dissipation issues in space (and also on earth) is to move to computing systems that operate entirely at cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of superconducting circuitry.
I've heard stories that over a decade ago teams inside hyperscalars had calculated that running completely cryogenically cooled data centers would be vastly cheaper than what we do now due to savings on resistive losses and the cost of eliminating waste heat. You don't have to get rid of heat that you don't generate in the first place.
The issue is that at the moment there are very few IC components and processes that have been engineered to run at cryogenic temperatures. Replicating the entirety of the existing data center stack for cryogenic temps is nowhere near reality.
That said, once you have cryogenic superconducting integrated circuits you could colocate your data centers and your propellant/oxidizer depots. Not exactly "data centers off in deep space" since propoxd tend to be the highest traffic areas.
by my calculations, the heat dissipation isn't that big a deal
take an h100 for example. it will need something like 1kW to operate. that's less than 4 square meters of solar panel
at 70C, a reasonable temp for H100, a 4 square meter radiator can emit north of 2kW of energy into deep space
seems to me like a 2x2x2 cube could house an H100 in space
perhaps I'm missing something?
Heat travels when there is a thermal gradient. What thermally superconducting material are you going to make your cube out of that the surface temperature is exactly the same as the core temperature? If you don't have one, then to keep the h100 at 70c, the radiators have to be colder. How much more radiator area do you need then?
Have you considered the effects of insolation? Sunlight heats things too.
How efficient is your power supply and how much waste heat is generated delivering 1kW you your h100?
How do you move data between the ground and your satellite? How much power does that take?
If it's in LEO, how many thermal cycles can your h100 survive? If it's not in LEO, go back to the previous question and add an order of magnitude.
I could go on, but honestly those details - while individually solvable - don't matter because there is no world where you would not be better off taking the exact same h100 and installing it somewhere on the ground instead
The typical GPU cloud machine will have 8 H100s in a box. I didnt check your math but if a single machine needs 32 square meter radiator, 200 machines will probably be the size comparable to the ISS.
How much does it cost to launch just the mass of something that big?
Do you see how unrealistic this is?
Given that budget, I can bundle in a SMR nuclear reactor and still have change left.
You guys clearly didn't read the full blog post where Musk mentions lunar mining. They're going to put an ASML machine on the moon and turns regolith into chips and solar panels automatically. Literally free compute
If you believe that, you’re Musks target investor group.
I was skeptical until you mentioned this. Now I'm onboard
This is your brain on Factorio
They’re going to have to deal with the moon nazis first. Oh no wait a minute.
Makes sense. I hope their plasma coolant supplies last long enough to get self sustained.
They'll just mine up Hemium-3 for that.
I can't even tell what's sarcasm anymore lol.
The comment you are replying to is definitely sarcasm… I hope?
Also cities in Mars, like who the fuck wants to live there?
Mars which is literally covered in poisonous perchlorate soil
I would, it would be an adventure.
You could have said the same thing about Europe or America. We could have just stayed in Africa, and the people like you did. But taking the leap worked pretty well, even if it was tough at the beginning.
Africa, Europe, America, Mars. I wonder if there is something about one of these that makes them unlike the others.
Actually, why not colonize Venus instead? Sure, it will be hard, at first, with all the sulphuric acid and intense heat and whatnot, but we colonized America, so why not Venus?
I'd rather colonize antarctica than mars.
We can't keep our already perfect planet livable, but we're going to terraform a totally new one. Yeah right buddy.
It'd probably be easier to terraform than convince everyone it's possible.
Earth keeps getting more livable!
We have a record high population, healthier and richer than ever.
You seem to be alive? So....
As a thought experiment, if humanity wanted to go all in on trying to move industrial processes and data centers off planet, would it make more sense to do so on the moon?
The moon has:
- Some water
- Some materials that can be used to manufacture crude things (like heat sinks?)
- a ton of area to brute force the heat sink problem
- a surface to burry the data centers under to solve the radiation problem
- close enough to earth that remote controlled semi-automated robots work
I think this would only work if some powerful entity wanted to commit to a hyper-scale effort.
The Moon also has 14 day long nights, while space has permanent sunlight for your solar panels.
I suspect this is really the fundamental idea behind this whole plan.
Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
> every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power
So it's dark 50% of the time on the moon... just like here on Earth.
... and completely not like a sun-synchronous Earth orbit which is dark 0% of the time.
it could be easier just to build in orbit. its a lot closer, sites can be positioned above various geographic locations as required.
i think the moon likely does contain vast mineral deposits though. when europeans first started exploring australia they found mineral anomalies that havent existed in europe since the bronze age.
the Pilbara mining region is very cool. it contains something like 25% of the iron ore on earth, and it is mostly mined using 100% remote controlled robots and a custom built 1000 mile rail network that runs 200-300 wagon trains, mostly fully automated. it is the closest thing to factorio in real life. 760,100 tonnes a year of iron ore mined out and shipped to China.
Probably a lot easier, but the moon looses a major selling point of data centres in space, namely reasonable latency. To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea. But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
> But I think that specifically the way Musk is trying to position it, the moon would be an even harder sell.
I agree. I would be quite a moonshot.
The elephant in the room for all lunar scenarios is lunar regolith. Even ignoring the toxicity to humans (big problem and will happen quite quickly for any humans there!), it will be a big long-term problem for robots and machinery in general.
Best bet is to put the servers in a rocket, go around the moon then land back on earth. Then install them in USE1.
What if instead we moved it all to a closer rock that has even more water, even more materials to manufacture crude (and even advanced) things, even more surface, more protection from radiation, and even crazier still had significantly less launch costs?
Almost any reason why the moon is better than in orbit is a point for putting it on earth.
I think there's something to be said about imagining a future where we can keep the earth clean of all the nasty industrial processes we have grown accustomed to living next to. A big part about this proposed idea is that you could do a lot of manufactoring in space.
I have long theorized there will be some game changing manufacturing processes that can only be done in a zero gravity environment. EX:
- 3d printing human organ replacements to solve the organ donor problem
- stronger materials
- 3d computer chips
I do not work in material science, so these crude ideas are just that, but the important part I'm getting at is that we can make things in space without any launches once that industry is bootstrapped.
Human organs manage to grow pretty well in 1G. In fact, they're almost certainly going to be terrible at it in zero g.
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.
Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
The French government issued a child porn warrant for the CEO and it isn't even a topic for discussion. That's what doesn't make sense to me. It's silly to talk about solar panel prices like reality matters at all to his cult of followers. It doesn't have to make sense. The less sense the better.
Reasonably sure this has less to do with putting data centres in space and more to do with getting them less auditable (see the other news about X getting raided about Grok)
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.
And nobody ever calls them out on it.
Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.
If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.
The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".
And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.
An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.
-------------------
Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.
But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.
This is the correct analysis.
Not to go all Ian Malcolm, but half this comment section is spending so much time wondering if we could build a space data center, without stopping to ask if it made any goddamn sense whatsoever to do so.
By keeping the whole thing on earth we can also reclaim the gold, copper, and rare earth metals when it’s financially viable to do so, rather than just letting them burn up on reentry.
You don’t even need the desert. Just put it in India and use coal power or whatever. AI training doesn’t care about latency to the data centre, so you could put it anywhere, as long as it is cheap.
I mean, I'd prefer they used some form of renewable energy.
But there should be plenty of options once you start actually optimising for the same use-case as space data centres. Many places have very predictable wind (especially off-shore, which gives you bonus access to cooling water). Or maybe you could set up small hydro power schemes along remote rivers.
After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must be factoring in something else-
Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR controlled countries and/or sanctioned countries/individuals.
Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can REALLY verify system behavior once its up there. So NSA/CIA etc sure are chomping at the bit to allow it.
I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less outlandish/tinfoily as well.
I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)
BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.
People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to put a hard disk into orbit.
I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
AI data-centers use upwards of 100MW. The biggest solar panels in space could produce around 240KW. When they speak of AI data-centers in space what do they actually mean in realistic non theoretical terms and where are the materials for this coming from?
If the AI data-center used only 10MW then each could have two redundant SMR's assuming the cooling challenges have been worked out but then we could have nuclear reactor disposal and collision issues.
I assume the idea is to have the entire constellation be the data center in question. Laser back haul transceiver bandwidth is in the same order of magnitude of rack-to-rack bandwidths [1][2]. I could see each sat being a rack and the entire mesh being a cluster.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2024/02/05/starlinks-inter-satellite-la... (and this is two years ago!) [2] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-accelerated-networking-re...
For AI training, latency is one of the limiting factors, which needs to be kept in the nanoseconds. And a light-nanosecond is famously almost exactly 1 foot.
That's why Lumen/Starcloud's designs all assume it'll be a space station with all containers connected to one central networking spine.
This is how Starlink works however, you would need orders of magnitude more compute than those router pucks. Orders of magnitude more power needs unless you combined a nuclear reactor to it. It’s just such a fever dream at this stage that he’s really doing it to muddy accounting and consolidate debts from Grok failures.
This is the thing I don’t get. Everyone talking about the “how” but nobody talking about the “why”? It makes literally no sense.
The only thing that keeps bouncing around in my thick skull is something "data-center sized" whatever that means to them could hold some interesting objects. 2 Peta Watt laser, Rods from God, Tactical nukes, Miniature Rail-gun to quickly eradicate other satellites, Off-Planet archives of stuff, Doomsday clusters of brainwave transmitters to shut off all the humans or force everyone to defecate at once.
Those are just some guesses. Some of those could also explain the "why" for SpaceX Falcon Heavy and it's future iterations. It can carry 63,800 kg (140,660 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit and that load capacity will only increase with future versions.
Because people have to compete just to have sand doing math for us? The why is that it's high time we stop worrying about how much compute we have. Certainly filling all solid planets in the solar system with computers is not nearly enough computation as we want (I'm not even talking about AI specifically).
Snake oil, like bitcoin.
A lot of people will invest in this because "it's the future" and a few will make a lot of money on that.
To Steelman the topic, Musk’s whole alleged mission is to make humans a multi-planet species that can survive an earth killing event.
To that end, a small data center space isn’t about unit-economics, it’s a bigger mission. So the question we should consider is what can we put into space the further that mission. Can we put a meaningful sum of human knowledge out there for preservation? It sounds like “yes,” even if we can’t train ChatGPT models out there yet.
When I was a kid, I had to go to CCD, a religious after school program for Catholics.
The whole time I was there it was a mental game of trying to steel man the contradictory or incoherent stuff, using my brain power to try and rewrite things to make sense.
After some years, I woke up and realized that’s what I was doing, and even if I could do it in my mind, that didn’t make the source material rational.
Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
> Heres hoping you have a similar moment.
I do not politically align with Musk. I’ve always thought Tesla was important in popularizing electric cars while being a low-quality built product with repair and supply chain issues. I think The Boring Company is a joke. Twitter was a power-grab.
I also think SpaceX is societally beneficial, a good means to shake-up a stagnant industry and a humanity-wide area of interest.
If you think I’m a member of a religious cult, I respectfully suggest you evaluate what led You to believe that itself.
I completely failed to convey my point. It’s not about any of your beliefs.
The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out of the noise, it was still just noise.
Where there is actual meaning in life, its kind of obvious, you dont have to rewrite so much to find it.
The problem of datacenters in space and knowledge preservation/disaster redundancy are entirely disjoint.
Datacenters in space have a lifespan measured in years. Single-digit years. Communicating with such an installation requires relatively advanced technology. In an extinction level crisis, there will be extremely little chance of finding someone with the equipment, expertise, and power to download bulk data. And don't forget that you have less than a decade to access this data before the constellation either fails or deorbits.
Meanwhile people who actually care about preserving knowledge in a doomsday crisis have created film reels containing a dump of GitHub and enough preamble that civilizations in the far future can reconstruct an x86 machine from scratch. These are buried under glaciers on earth.
We've also launched (something like) a microfilm dump of knowledge to the moon which can be recovered and read manually any time within the next several hundred or thousand years.
Datacenters in space don't solve any of the problems posed because they simply will not last long enough.
Let's say there is an earth killing event, and let's say there is an outpost on Mars with some people on it. How much does it really matter that some humans survive, in light of the enormous catastrohophe that killed all life on earth? Is it a very worthwhile objective for our species to persist a while longer, or should we not just accept that also life itself will will die out on geological or astronomical time scales?
I would suppose there is a gap we face between true species-wide survival capability and where we sit today. I have no true idea how hard we must go to bridge that gap, but it’s quite hard and far.
I also see no reason to “lay down and die” as I feel is somewhat implied here. I think it’s a truly noble cause, but maybe I read too much sci-fi as a young lad.
No matter what anyone does, the universe will end, and reality will stop changing.
Everything dies. Deal with it.
Instead of empowering shithead grifters who promise you a way out, grow trees to create shade for people you will never know. You do that by improving things, not burning limited resources on a conman.
If this outcome is guaranteed, why hasn't it already happened ?
Because we exist inside time, not outside it.
How do you know it hasn't?
The whole point of the space stuff is not accepting all life dying out on any timescale.
Even rocks don’t last. What do you expect?
A data center in space is probably toast after some years of space radiation.
High performance chips are made for the shielded atmosphere. Imagine the cost launching all the extra shielding that you don't need on earth.
It is beyond stupid. Comical levels. I can't believe people are trying to find any justification.
I’m not the right type of engineer to know and, hell, software largely isn’t engineering anyway…
Can you not provide any type of shielding at scale to wrap a (small, not Google tier) data center? To be honest my criticism with TFA is its focus on “you can’t do massive scale” rather than the premise entirely.
Yes, but the added mass makes it prohibitively expensive. Shielding is heavy and every kilogram of added payload results in a geometric increase in fuel load.
The rocket equation will kick your ass every time.
If that's really the case: wouldn't merging or collaborating with Nvidia make more sense then with xAI?
A sum or product of human knowledge is not humanity: that specific mission (putting it into space for preservation or contact) has been done (Voyagers and others) and is done continuously (radiowaves).
Making a dent into making humans a multiplanetary species requires making a lot of companion species as well; the task requires much more elementary stuff (relative to the mission), at the ground level, than Musk is demonstrating to do (at technical, entrepreneurial and political level).
This is a con, from the start. It just worked so far so some people fall for it.
Musk's whole mission is to scam even more people. Unfortunately people still buy his bullshit even though he couldn't deliver on anything, and just converts one failure to hyping up his next idiotic product.
(Yes, I know what steel manning is)
Couldn’t deliver on anything?
Sure but you could do that with a simple disc in space
Actually, the data centers can be the discs. As long as the data centers can crunch on, we don't need to stay alive here on earth
They're gonna propose something dumb like ejecting coolant out into space as a disposable heatsink and then they're gonna spend a bunch of money trying to build a proof-of-concept but it will never go anywhere because it's really some kinda money laundering scheme or whatever the Hyperloop nonsense was.
Musk said in his autobiography he announced the hyperloop plan without any intention of doing it to distract from the California high speed rail plans.
It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"
And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.
But at some point patience runs thin and the only response that breaks through the irrationality is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"
The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.
With regards to a community, I once heard someone say that it takes 10 "atta boy"'s to counteract 1 "you suck".
I also remember, roughly 10 years ago, people saying that the amount of effort to discredit bullshit is wildly out of whack. Which makes bullshit basically asymmetric warfare.
So here we are, in this thread, actually spending time attempting to discredit bullshit.
Well said.
How about we just make a giant heatsink that reaches into space instead. Then we can cool the whole planet. Coming up with crazy ideas is cheap, but the logistics are obviously impractical.
Look into radiative cooling. Basically this, but more practical. Several companies working on it: https://www.skycoolsystems.com/
I don't quite believe this.
Is it really better than just using solar panels to run a heat pump?
> Our core innovation is a radiative cooling material that we’ve combined with a panel system to improve the efficiency of any vapor-compression based cooling system
A heat pump is a “ vapor-compression based cooling system” so that tech is an addition-to not an instead-of.
Whether it’s better probably depends on how expensive the additional efficiency is in practice.
> SkyCool’s Panels save 2x – 3x as much energy as a solar panel generates given the same area.
So if you’re area constrained maybe.
This looks like it depends on the outside air to cool the coolant. "Radiative" can mean that too, not just IR radiation.
We had one. It was that sulphur used in shipping fuel.
It possibly makes sense if you're preparing for war, harder to hit, harder to physically break into, beyond the range of nuclear EMP, and accessible from anywhere on earth.
> harder to hit
press x to doubt
> on 21 February 2008, the US Navy destroyed USA-193 in Operation Burnt Frost, using a ship-fired RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 about 247 km (153 mi) above the Pacific Ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO. At least on Earth data centers in theory can be hidden and physically hardened. In orbit, even a crude rocket able to reach that plane can become a weapon of mass satellite destruction. Even if those orbits clear out in four or five years, by then whatever ugliness is going on down on the surface of Earth will likely have resolved one way or the other. Starlink is a great military asset for a superpower pushing around smaller states in ways that aren't an existential threat to them. In a real conflict, it's a fragile target beyond the strike capacities of much of the developing world but easily destroyed by any moderate level industrial nation.
Any country capable of producing nuclear warheads will also be able to toss up enough BBs and other small objects into LEO to wipe out most of Starlink and anything else in LEO.
South Africa built nuclear weapons in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma...
But it never had an orbital launch capability.
Pakistan doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability but it does have nuclear weapons.
Surprisingly, the United Kingdom doesn't have a domestic orbital launch capability at present though it has had ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for many decades.
At present, I would say that building a basic implosion-assembled atomic bomb is easier than building a rocket system that reach low Earth orbit. It's a lot easier to build a bomb now than it was in the 1940s. The main thing that prevents wider nuclear weapon proliferation is treaties and inspections, not inherent technical difficulties.
presumably the UK could figure out how to remove the top of a trident missile and replace it with a load of ball bearings
Tridents can reach mach 19. Orbital velocity is more like mach 100.
Not that the UK manufactures trident missiles anyway.
You don't need orbital velocity to blow satellites away. Just do a well-timed suborbital launch against the satellite's orbit, and the satellite will provide most of the kinetic energy.
27720km/h orbital velocity is Mach 22.4 at a sea level speed of sound
Orbital velocity is nowhere near mach 100.
if only you could put some sort of explosive charge on the top
You do not need orbital capability to hit an orbital target. Just suborbital missile that reaches target's orbital altitude.
Satellites. Are. Fragile. People really don’t seem to intuitively understand this. Earth based assets are orders of magnitude more difficult to attack simply by virtue of being able to be placed inside of fortified structures anchored to, or inside of, the ground. The cost to deploy hardened buildings at scale is peanuts compared to orbiting constellations.
They also fail to realize how devastating an attack a BB canister grenade would be in LEO. Nothing would stay in orbit. Eventually everything would collide and come down.
LEO is big, really big. Even at the smaller radius of ground level, large volcanos, forest fires, etc. Don't affect the whole earth.
No?
Isn't the eventual plan to park these data centers out by the Lagrange points?
You don't need EMP for that. Few ASAT missiles will start the avalanche and turn orbits around Earth into shooting range. Good luck talking to your satellites with shredded antennas and solar panels.
I agree with the author and the bit about xAI and investors makes sense. But why does a company like Google invest in this ridiculous idea?
Let's do some napkin math on it
Current satellites get around 150W/kg from solar panels. Cost of launching 1kg to space is ~$2000, so we're at $13.3(3)/Watt, that just power, let's assume that cooling will cost us same per kg, the same amount need to be dissipated so let's round it to $27
One NVidia GB200 rack is ~120kW. To just power it, you need to send $3 240 000 worth of payload into space. Then you need to send additional $3 106 000 (rack of them is 1553kg) worth of servers. Plus some extra for piping. We're already at $6.3 mil a pop for just hauling it up to orbit, with no cost of solar cells included
I'd imagine comparable hardware for just some solar + batteries on ground is around $200k. I dunno where the repeated 5x cost number comes from. I suspect whoever pushed it was just lying
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.
Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.
There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.
And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
Elon has used the greater fool theory for so long that they no longer exist on earth (at least fools with money who aren't also using the greater fool theory). It makes perfect sense he would focus on space because if he does find aliens it'll be an entirely new investor pool for him, and he desperately needs that now.
I always thought that in the case of a rouge AI breakout that we could just cut the power or network. This makes both impossible. The sick genius of SkyNet was having the most defensible infrastructure when it became clear that whoever controls the biggest robot army can take out enemy data centers and control the world. Now I hope that shooting down LEO satellites is cheap and DIY-able.
I think it’s all farce and technically unsound, but I also think that grok-5-elononly is a helluva drug. It’s really got him ready to rally investors behind “spreading the light of consciousness to the universe”. Oh to see the chat logs of their (Elon and his machine girlfriend)’s machinations.
A month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46286645
Related, around the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087616
Current analysis shows space-based compute costs roughly 3x more per watt than terrestrial equivalents, requiring launch costs to fall below $200/kg before achieving economic parity—a threshold unlikely before the mid-2030s even with Starship’s full reusability.
While technically not impossible, the space data center vision appears primarily designed to support SpaceX’s anticipated mid-2026 IPO and justify a $1.5 trillion valuation rather than solve near-term compute constraints.
That's the point. Nonsensical ideas (like humans on mars) drive valuations higher. There is not even a point to argue about practical matters.
> Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers.
Author made a fatal mistake. By flying enough hardware in space, you can simply blot out the sun and steal their solar capacity. Drink their milkshake with a long straw!
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.
Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.
Ain't my money being spent.
As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
It is your money being spent. ~40B so far. Though half of that is for services.
But more abstractly, it's our resources that are being allocated. The planet as a unit is deciding where to put it's effort. Apparently we're not very good at this
I can’t take any of it seriously.
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.
I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.
However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.
People are gettingtoo hung up on the radiator math and completely missing the massive input advantage of AM0 versus AM1.5. On Earth you get around 1,000 Watts/m^2 (ideal), but in realtiy shave off 20–25% because of clouds and night time. In a sun-synchronous orbit, you’re pulling close to 1300 W/m^2, and that's 24x7. That is easily a 5x to 6x energy yield advantage per square meter of panel per day, and when you have that much surplus energy free from the vacuum, you can afford to brute-force the cooling problem by dumping massive wattage into active heat pumps to raise your radiator temps, effectively paying for the inefficiency of space cooling with the abundance of space power.
You do not solve a problem that is many orders of magnitude more difficult with a mere 5x to 6x efficiency gain.
Requirements for power still don't come close to total or practical surface area. If we get to that point, space collectors with microwave beams to the ground are viable.
Computing hardware that isn't rad-hard is going to have a bad time without a handy atmosphere for shielding.
And hardware that is happy in high-radiation environments is not going to be fast.
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space
I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.
Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.
The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others. Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.
Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
SpaceX made a request of the FCC to authorize a constellation of 1 million satellites. And these are going to be much larger, "data center" satellites. This many satellites, all in the same orbit (sun-synchronous is a specific orbit), vastly changes the math on Kessler syndrome.
> Particularly at high altitudes.
Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.
The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less time it will last.
There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way lower than things like GEO.
Assuming that we place an iron ball (ideal sphere-shaped and thermal conductivity) on the SSO (solar synchronous orbit), how hot can the object be?
Given the solar constant 1361 W/m^2, you can calculate the temperature range based on the emissivity and absorptivity. With the right shape and “color”, the equilibrium temperature can be cooler than most people thought.
I suppose that a space data center powered 100% by solar is no different than this iron ball in principle.
The ideal shape would be a shaded, flat panel perpendicular to the sun right?
That should be better than a sphere. Though I imagine there could be some fancier 3D geometry designs.
Even for a simple sphere, if we give it different surface roughnesses on the sun-facing side and the "night" side, it can have dramatically different emissivity.
About 120 degC.
What data centers in space enable is protection for the compute of near-superintelligent AIs from the interference of humans.
As an alleged human, I'd like to preserve my option to interfere.
No, no, no - Villa Starlight was the prison the Tessier-Ashpool AI needed help to escape from!
Data centers in space make sense because its nigh impossible to build things terrestrially. NIMBYism is so out of control the largest solar array in the US in the middle of the mojave got cancelled because it would interfere with the view.
"Just change the law" ok sure we'll get right on it.
"Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective"
The author forgot to add that this is only true from the perspective of their own bias.
To someone else it might make a lot of sense, e.g. someone who expects militant resistance to the "data centers" from the general public or some other actor that is highly unlikely to achieve space capabilities.
How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and seize or block?
They make no sense otherwise.
The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a scheme to get investment and they’re never going to actually go through with it.
At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.
Isn't Starlink already basically a distributed datacenter in space? they have like ~9k+ satellites up there already at least according to: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html.
what am I missing here?
I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.
I guess the xAI/SpaceX thing is mainly a financial move and they made up an interesting story to give it some context
I bet they can already weaponize their satellites to prevent the launch of other satellites.
Putting data centers in space keeps them out of reach of humans with crowbars and hammers, which may have been a vulnerability for those robots Tesla is building.
I am willing to bet the whole xAI/SpaceX merger is simply a ploy by Musk to evade releasing accurate historical information about SpaceX's finances. How much did it actually cost SpaceX to launch a kilogram of payload into space each year? How much is NASA actually donating them, per each year?
I mean, I still remember promises of $1000-per-kg for space launches, and how e.g. Gigafactory will produce half of the world battery supply, and other non-scientific fiction peddled by Musk. Remember when SpaceX suggested in 2019 that the US Army could use its Starship rockets to transport troops and supplies across the planet in minutes? I do. By the way, have they finished testing Starship yet, is it ready?
What jurisdiction does a data center in space fall under, anyway? The one of the nation that launched it?
Google, Spacex, several startups are all doing this. The best people in their fields think it might be viable. I'm skeptical as well, but you do wonder if maybe they are right and how exciting that would be.
Everyone else is announcing initiatives to investigate the feasibility of this because earthlings currently hate the data center build out. The news is full of anti-DC stories about how much electricity/water they're using. They're selling a story.
I thought chips need to be radiation-hardened to work in space.
I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
Given xAI's gross disregard for environmental regulations in building Colossus, the reason for building datacenters in space seems obvious: there's no EPA in space.
Remember what the Luddites actually did? They sabotaged the machines that were disrupting their livelihoods. If AI is as disruptive to large numbers of workers as some people think it will be, keep in mind it's a lot easier to destroy a GPU that's stored on earth than one in space.
Anyone planning expenditures as large as a modern data center thinks about all kinds of risks (earthquakes, climate, power, etc), and so perhaps there is a premium for GPUs that are out of the reach of your median angry unemployed guy.
(yes, this is nuts, but I can easily imagine some fever-dream pitch meeting where Musk is talking about it)
The luddites won't need to sabotage a space based GPU. They can just wait for waste heat, radiation, or a good old solar storm to do it for them. The rest of the ground lauch infrastructure is fragile.
I don't get the point at all of these. You:
- have very non-deterministic latency
- are located outside of a country that can protect you (ie China could disrupt your space data center)
- have to pay millions of dollars to swap out hardware
And what about servicing? Last I checked these data centers don't run without incident and need people (or fine robots) to physically interact with them.
You’re also located outside of any country that could regulate
A country will definitely still be able to regulate you. Also under what regulations they'd be afraid of other than local building laws
and : kessler syndrome
I’m surprised everyone is worried about heat dissipation.
Datacenters in space is ambiguous enough to mean on lunar soil which provides plenty of heat dissipation using geothermal heat pumps.
Similarly mass to orbit is also less problematic if silicon factories (including the refineries) are built on lunar soil as well.
They have filed actual plans with the FCC for their satellite constellation. They are not talking about lunar data centers.
Electric cars make no sense.
Reusable rockets make no sense.
Autonomous cars make no sense.
Data centers in space make no sense. <--- You are here.
Humanoid robots make no sense.
Hyperloop: makes no sense
Solar roof tiles: makes no sense
Lot's of tiny tunnels under cities: makes no sense
Performance of the new roadster: makes no sense
All four of the above were likely scams. Musk is not beyond running a scam.
It doesn't make any sense to me either, but there are lots of things like that where the other thing is harder. As an example, a thing people say online a lot is something like "Why do the techbros build self-driving cars instead of just putting it on rails for efficiency and then they could call it a TRAIN?"
The answer to that is that coordination problems are really hard. Much harder even than what are currently unsolved engineering problems. In fact, SpaceX can only launch from California because they have DOD coverage for their launches. Otherwise the California Coastal Commission et al. would have blocked them entirely. Perhaps the innovation for affordable space Internet is combining it with mixed-use technology.
The truth is that in America today self-driving cars (regulated by a state board run by bureaucrats) are easier to build than trains (regulated by every property owner on the train route). Mark Zuckerberg tried to spend some money evaluating a train across the Bay and had to give up. But Robotaxi service is live in San Francisco.
So if there is an angle that makes sense to me it's that they anticipate engineering challenges beatable in a way where regulatory challenges are not.
Interesting insight. I can think of some objections, but they don't change your point.
I also checked out your blog and got 2 interesting articles in 2 tries. If you have some personal favourites and listing them is not a bother, I'd be happy to read them.
That's awfully kind of you to say! I added a section to the Main Page listing a couple of ones that people have mentioned to me before, though it's a bit of a cluttered page so I doubt it works as it stands.
A few things I think of more frequently than they affect my life are:
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Abolish_The_First_Lady - arguing that the FLOTUS role shouldn't exist
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Upward_Mobility,_Downward_So... - perhaps a less original idea that economic mobility leads to poorly performing lower-paying services.
* https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis - an example of one way that factoids get upgraded to facts
Is there any insight into how Starlink solved cooling? One 'expert' insisted that there is no reason to expect that data center satellites would generate any more heat than starlinks.
Those have a power budget of about 1 rack. I would expect a datacenter satellite to need more cooling if it has more compute.
And 1 ML rack uses the power of like 10 regular racks
So, most of the power that Starlink satellites use go into the comms, right? Blasting out electromagnetic radiation to receiver stations on earth, and also the laser(?) backhaul between satellites.
Modulo some efficiency losses, most of the electricity it generates is leaving the satellite. Contrast with a datacenter, where most of the energy is spent heating up the chips, and the rest is spent moving the heat away from those chips.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
Aluminum is 8% of the earth's crust and silicon is 28%; I think we're good
Two reasons why it makes sense (really really good reasons):
1) Water scarcity and energy scarcity here on earth
2) It will drive down launch costs and promotes investment in orbital facilities and launch capabilities.
those two reasons alone are enough.
What does water scarcity have to do with anything? Data centers don't use water. They slightly heat it, and then it flows back out to whatever it would have done anyway.
you know you're looking at some hard analysis when they use the number "gazillion". can I get that one in scientific notation?
Three counterpoints:
1) Kessler syndrome is a contingency.
2) This is a logistics issue, not a physical impossibility.
3) Those are different tradeoffs (solar in space). There is not really an argument there.
All in all this is extremely weak reasoning, which is quite the contrast with the definitive title.
I throw this to the "nerds need to feel smarter than Elon" pile of articles. :)
This makes the same amount of sense as colonising Mars.
where do you put things, so that no one will be able to warrant thier way into access?
entirely out of jurisdiction, where it is prohibitively expensive to travel, and impractical for any physical seizure.
you dont need to compute, just store it and P2P amongst satellites.
essentially an orbital NAS.
You can debate this until you are blue in the face. If the costs are less they will do it. If they aren’t they won’t do it. That’s the only sense that needs to be made.
Ah, yes, the "efficient market hypothesis", it's well known that no company has ever gone bankrupt because every company only does things that are optimally efficient and profitable.
No company has ever made an investment in something that ended up being more expensive than calculated, or so expensive it bankrupted them.
"Let him cook" makes so much sense here.
Like there isn’t enough stuff floating up there already.
There are two very distinct kinds of AI workloads that go into data centres:
Inference just might be doable in space because it is "embarrassingly parallel" and can be deployed as a swarm of thousands of satellites, each carrying the equivalent of a single compute node with 8x GPUs. The inputs and outputs are just text, which is low bandwidth. The model parameters only need to be uploaded a few times a year, if that. Not much storage is required , just a bit of flash for the model, caching, logging, and the like. This is very similar to a Starlink satellites, just with bigger solar panels and some additional radiative cooling. Realistically, a spacecraft like this would use inference-optimised chips, not power-hungry general purpose NVIDIA GPUs, LPDDR5 instead of HBM, etc...Training is a whole other ballgame. It is parallelisable, sure, but only through heroic efforts involving fantastically expensive network switches with petabits of aggregated bandwidth. It also needs more general-purpose GPUs, access to petabytes of data, etc. The name of the game here is to bring a hundred thousand or more GPUs into close proximity and connect them with a terabit or more per GPU to exchange data. This cannot be put into orbit with any near-future technologies! It would be a giant satellite with square kilometers of solar and cooling panels. It would certainly get hit sooner or later by space debris, not to mention the hazard it poses to other satellites.
The problem with putting inference-only into space is that training still needs to go somewhere, and current AI data centres are pulling double-duty: they're usable for both training and inference, or any mix of the two. The greatest challenge is that a training bleeding edge model needs the biggest possible clusters (approaching a million GPUs!) in one place, and that is the problem -- few places in the world can provide the ~gigawatt of power to light up something that big. Again, the problem here is that training workloads can't be spread out.
Space solves the "wrong" problem! We can distribute inference to thousands of datacentre locations here on Earth, each needs just hundreds of kilowatts. That's no problem.
It's the giaaaant clusters everyone is trying to build that are the problem.
If someone had the tech to cool stuff in space, that is required for this to happen, they’d have tons of easier and more lucrative opportunities right now on Earth to become the new richest person.
Where is the tech?
Data centers on earth alone don't make sense if we want to expand further into the galaxy.
It seems quite telling we are even discussing this.
Don't let common sense stop you from a good time.
It makes a misleading argument about the price of solar panels falling. The cost of solar power installations has been flat for a decade because it's dominated by other costs.
Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
no, no, no, the key enabler to space datacenter is complete out-of-world computer 3D printers. You print entire 130nm, hell, even 130 micrometer GPUs and DDR2 VRAMs to go with, entirely on the Moon solely from Moon dusts, and shoot the complete satellites out into Earth LEO using maglev sleds. PUEs, opex, nothing matter because the Moon factory is self contained and don't interact with Earthian economy at all. The ssh key into the factory will be the source to free money to whoever holding it.
Is that possible in our lifetime? I'd be optimistic about that. Can SpaceX pull that off? Space what? ...
No no, let Musk cook. This definitely won't be SpaceX's Cybertruck moment, where they completely throw away their first-mover advantage by wasting five years chasing after the egotistical boondoggle of a delusional megalomaniac.
Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcR7kqOb3o) Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least). TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.
The article kind of ended all of a sudden without much of a conclusion… but as most people by now have realised once they heard of the merging of Musk and Musk, it sounds more likely just a way of shifting money to pay himself rather than to actually build anything he says.
I’d even bet that when they do IPO, there will be ZERO mention of “space data centres” in the prospectus!
Of course it makes sense.
The regulatory framework is getting more and more difficult for data centers.
The options are move to countries with less of an uphill regulatory burden (UAE?), but this comes with other issues.
Space it is.
Another thing that doesn't make sense about them is that DCs get a lot of out of physical locality. Caches become hot as different use case spin up and down during the day near their customers.
If the nodes are spinning around the earth at orbital velocities, then all the benefits of physical locality are thrown out the window.
But apologists would say that putting the data centers in LEO would mean that latency to a client via a ground station wouldn't be much more than ~50 ms extra. At least LATAM and Africa would be getting a good deal out of it with better coverage.
It's lala land nonsense.
- Data centres need a lot of power = giant vast solar panels
- Data centres need a lot of cooling. That's some almighty heatsinks you're going need
- They will need to be radiation-hardened to avoid memory corruption = even more mass
- The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
- Data centres are about 100x bigger (not including solar panels and heat sinks) than the biggest thing we've ever put in space
Tesla is losing market share (and rank increasingly poorly against alternatives), his robots are gonna fail, this datacentre ambition needs to break the laws of physics, grok/twitter is a fake news pedo-loving cesspit that's gonna be regulated into oblivion. Its only down from here on out.
Maybe instead of housing life, civilizations develop Dyson's spheres to house data centers. Solar panels on the interior, thermal radiators on the exterior and the data centers make up the structure in between. Combine that Von Neumann probes and you've got a fun new Fermi paradox hypothesis!
Don't combine it with von Neumann probes and you've solved the Fermi paradox: a civilization that puts that much work into computing power is either doing the equivalent of mining crypto and going nowhere, or is doing AI and is so dependent on it that they inevitably form a vast echo chamber (echo sphere?) that only wants to talk to itself (itselves?) and can't bear to be left out by adding the latency unavoidably added by distance.
tl;dr: civilizations advanced enough to travel between stars end up trapped by the resources and physics required to keep up with the Joneses.
> - The hardware will be redundant in like 2 years tops and will need replacing to stay competitive
Hey! It can be de-orbited onto the location of your choosing. I bet you can sell this service to the DoD!
Barring that, you can sell it on the global market to the highest bidder.
If we won't stop what he is doing with grok and ai-generated CSAM, he will be completely free from oversight up there.
Dealing with rogue AI also seems easier when you can walk up to its data center and unplug it.
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...
If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?
That does not have to sound reasonable to us ... only to Musk.
A pie in the sky
Comments full of EDS. Everyone is a rocket scientist in here also.
how much latency would a minecraft server in space have?
With live migration it could be quite low, like 10 ms.
Next up, the Boring Company gets imaginary contract for underground datacenters, is now valued at $500B.
Nah. They get contract for mining on Mars, valued north of $1T.
there was an article recently about a company wanting to put nuclear reactors at the bottom of very deep boreholes (like km deep).
I thought that was actually quite interesting/practical, because if there is a problem, you can just bury the problem.
not like tmi/fukushima/chernobyl
Interesting idea. 2km deep could work. I'm not sure how cooling or maintenance would work.
Depth below surface | Typical temperature (°C) | Indicative cost to drill 1.2 m diameter hole
500 m | 15–25 | $5–10 million
1 km | 25–40 | $10–20 million
2 km | 50–70 | $25–45 million
3 km | 75–100 | $50–80 million
4 km | 100–130 | $90–140 million
5 km | 130–160 | $150–250 million
maybe not the article I read, but similar:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/underground-nuclear-reactor-deep-f...
Data centers in space make sense when you want it to cost 200x more than on land, be unavailable for repairs and upgrades, and be either high latency or be out of commission during periods of darkness.
A more reasonable project would be repurposing portions of the ISS for a data center and using that as a POC for larger scale stations.
What if you just took some ketamine and tried again? Does it make sense?
I just purchased a sandwich I made from myself in a deal that values me a $1tn. I plan to make toasties in space.
He's going to do a DOGE (memecoin not government agency) equivalent over phones new satellite links to his SpaceX sats outside anyone national jurisdiction. Worth the possibility of taking over being the world's global currency unconnected from any/all government.
What is this website?
The website insists that you let it record your voice in order to show you the dangers of AI. Is it trolling the visitor? https://civai.org/talk
But it's absolutely amazing hype and memevestors love it.
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.
Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?
As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
This is written by someone that is not in aerospace that thinks terrestrially.
Engineering is always a question of tradeoffs.
Launch costs are dropping, and we’re still using inefficient rockets. Space elevators & space trains, among others, can drop this much more, the launch costs are still dropping, even using rockets, maybe we’ll never get to elevators & trains the costs will drop so low!
Radiation shielding is not required for VLEO or LEO, and phenomenally more capable aerospace processors are near - hi Microchip Inc! There are many other radiation solutions coming, no doubt with nuclear power.
Satellites can be upgraded at scale, though for many things, it does not make $ sense to upgrade them, but fuel , reaction wheels, solar panels, among other things do make $ sense to replace.
Latency was technically solved in 1995 & 2001 with the first laser comms missions NASDA’s ETS-VI kiku-6 and ESA’s Artemis , and Laser crossbars for comms are common. A full laser TDRS no RF is not yet extant but soon. Earth to deepspace was just demonstrated by ESA.
Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
Furthermore, it is very likely that as neuromorphics with superior SWaP emerge, we could see very different models of space based computation.
Economic tradeoffs should drive many of these decisions as I’m not discussing the other applications of datacenter in space
> Cooling can be significantly improved due to lower launch costs, heat piping, RTGs, TEGs, and thermoradiative cells, not to mention sunside solar and darkside inline radiators
You're saying they're going to steal the night? We'll see the sun in the day, radiative cooling for surveillance AI in the time formerly known as night?
I'll confess that the numbers aren't nearly as bad as I'd thought. Apparently, you can dissipate 1MW at 100°C with a 17m diameter sphere at night. So it's like the size of a small house. It doesn't even glow. On the other hand, you need a lot of temperature differential to move the heat out fast enough, which means your TPUs are going to be hellishly hot.
Though you'd probably only run it when it's in the sun and radiate in other directions, so you don't have to store the power in heavy batteries. You need a 56m diameter disk of solar panels to provide 1MW, don't forget that.
(All figures were vibe calculated with Claude and are unchecked.)
How else would you secure skynet against Sarah Connor?
Admiral Grace Hopper is famous for using a length of wire to explain to others what a nanosecond was.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-embraces-musks-g...
Data centers in space make absolute sense when you want as close to real time analysis on all sorts of information. Would you rather have it make the round trip, via satellite to the states? Or are you going to build these things on the ground near a battlefield?
Musk is selling a vision for a MASSIVE government contract to provide a service that no one else could hope to achieve. This is one of those projects where he can run up the budget and operating costs like Boeing, Northrup etc, because it has massive military applications.
What if they diverted a decent sized asteroid into earth orbit and put the data center onto that? Could it be put into a sun-synchronous orbit, cover one side with solar cells, and use the backside of the asteroid itself for cooling?
Facts.
Just do the basic thermal heat transfer math.
We were supposed to be on Mars right now, but I guess data centers in space are nice too. Kinda disappointed they aren't on the moon.
What? A pump and dump scheme? I am shocked I tell you, shocked
I'd be curious to know simply how large the thermal radiator necessary to keep a typical GPU server cooled would be. Do they completely dwarf the server size? Can you do something with some esoteric material that is not particularly load-bearing but holds up well in space to get around some of these challenges?
AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax purposes).
This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.
It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
Like I’ve always said love him or hate him Elon Musk is a SPACE OIL SALESMAN!
A thought experiment. Imagine that you had some magic way of getting all the electricity you wanted at the south pole, you had good internet connectivity, and the various treaties about the place weren't an issue for you. Would you want to build a data center there?
Seems like a pretty obvious "no" to me. Loudoun County is a much better choice, just to pick one alternative. Antarctica is an awfully inhospitable place and running a data center there would be a nightmare.
And yet it's way better than space. It's much easier to get to. Cooling is about a thousand times easier. The radiation environment is much more forgiving.
This whole concept is baffling to me.
(Incidentally, a similar thought experiment is useful when talking about colonizing Mars. Think about colonizing the south pole. Mars is a harsher environment in just about every way, so take the difficulties of colonizing the south pole and multiply them.)
I can assure this author: strapping a company that lights money on fire (today, maybe not tomorrow) to a cash flow enterprise makes the IPO harder, not easier, in the absence of credible plan. The market speculates, but it’s not being completely irrational. I’d actually be surprised if we didn’t have factories or data centers in space one day.
Truth doesn't matter.
What matters is that investors and shareholders love to hear about future space data centers.
Obligatory /s.
Data centers in space are the logical progression from the multi trillion business of m2m and edge computing. It removes all physical limits to investment.
You mean physical reality
Counterpoint: https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1997906033168330816
(If you can't xcancel it yourself your hacker card is revoked.)
That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit
This is not a counterpoint, it is a post discussing the same topic but it doesn't address any of the points in this article.
*Data centers in space only make sense if they are cost effective relative to normal data centers*.
Disagree there are bunch of scenarios where Data Centers in space make sense. Like nuclear annihilation and having vaults across the globe to communicate and get back lost information because ground data centers would be wiped out by EMP from blasts.
Has it occurred to anyone that you can put computers underground? In this apocalyptic scenario you are describing, how do you expect the ground based command and control infrastructure to survive? Satellites are 100% reliant on ground based operations. That is a hard requirement. And if you put the command and control underground, might as well just skip the whole space based plan and just put the data underground.
Why is it hard requirement?
You can make some part of operations on high orbit that won’t decay as much then more ops on lower orbits that decay faster.
If you put stuff underground it is much harder to communicate.
And here I thought Musk's fans are all about digging holes in the ground. The flamethrower fumes might have caused temporary amnesia.
To say so I am not a Musk fan - I am sci-fi fan and I make imaginary/silly stuff up on my own.
I also like reading how people argue with not what I wrote but with what they imagined I wrote.
It was not my intention to single you out, my apologies.
There is nothing wrong to imagine anything you like. But if you do it as a CEO, i personally consider that as fraud. Guess I'm weird and old-fashioned like that.
After the bulk of humanity is wiped out, it will be a comfort that I can still use AI to generate dank memes.
Space offers some unique benefits that enable computing that’s impossible or very hard to do on earth. E.g. Super conducting computing is possible, which can be thousands times to millions times faster than current CPU while using very little energy. When the satellite moves in the shade of the earth, temperature drops significantly. It can be low enough to enable superconducting. When the satellite moves under the sun, the solar panel can start charging up the battery to power the ongoing operation.
i don't understand? you won't insulate the craft from the sun? and you expect the craft to get rid of its heat just from being behind the earth for a moment?
If you read these comments carefully, you see that they can all be summed up as:
"That Musk guy is so naive to think you can put data centers in space, what a doof".
Similar comments were probably made regarding electric cars, reusable rockets, buying Twitter, and so on.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
> No cooling necessary.
This is false, it's hard to cool things in space. Space (vacuum) is a very good insulator.
3 are ways to cool things (lose energy):
In space, only radiation works, and it's the least efficient of those 3 options.Superconductors.
Magnets.
(We're just saying random physics things right?)
Could we use a constant stream of micro-asteroids as a heatsink?
i think so, next is Quantum right?
No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Space is not cold or hot - it isn't. It's a vacuum. Vacuum has no temperature, but objects in space reach temperatures set by radiative balance with their environment. This makes it difficult to get rid of heat. On earth heat can be dumped through phase change and discharged (evaporation), or convection or any number of other ways. In space the only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away.
Superconductors don't have any resistance - and so heating from resistance isn't present. However, no super conducting computers have been created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing
And yes, it is really impressive - but we're also talking about one chip in liquid helium on earth. One can speculate about the "what if we had..." but we don't. If you want to make up technologies I would suggest becoming a speculative fiction author.
Heating of the spacecraft would get it on the warm side.
https://www.amu.apus.edu/area-of-study/science/resources/why...
> The same variations in temperature are observed in closer orbit around the Earth, such as at the altitudes that the International Space Station (ISS) occupies. Temperatures at the ISS range between 250° F in direct sunlight and -250° F in opposition to the Sun.
> You might be surprised to learn that the average temperature outside the ISS is a mild 50° F or so. This average temperature is above the halfway point between the two temperature extremes because objects in orbit obviously spend more time in partial sunlight exposure than in complete opposition to the Sun.
> The wild fluctuations of 500° F around the ISS are due to the fact that there is no insulation in space to regulate temperature changes. By contrast, temperatures on Earth’s surface don’t fluctuate more than a few degrees between day and night. Fortunately, we have an atmosphere and an ozone layer to insulate the Earth, protect it from the Sun’s most powerful radiation and maintain relatively consistent temperatures.
If you want solar power, you've got to deal with the 250 °F (121 °C). This is far beyond the specification for super conducting materials. For that matter, even -250 °F (-156 °C = 116 K) is much warmer than the super conducting chip range of 10 K.
Furthermore, the cryogenic material boils off in space quite significantly (I would suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot#LEO_d... or https://spacexstock.com/orbital-refueling-bottlenecks-what-i... "Even minor heat exposure can cause fuel to boil off, increasing tank pressure and leading to fuel loss. Currently, the technology for keeping cryogenic fuels stable in space is limited to about 14 hours.") You are going to have significant problems trying to keep things at super conducting temperatures for a day, much less a month or a year.
Even assuming that you can make a computer capable of doing AI training using super computers this decade (or even the next) ... zero resistance in the wire is not zero power consumption. That power consumption is again heat.
---
> Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor.
Theoretically you can do whatever you want and run it on nuclear fusion. Practically, the technologies that you are describing are not things that are viable on earth, much less to try to ship a ton of liquid helium into space (that's even harder than shipping a ton of liquid hydrogen - especially since harvesting it is non-trivial).
---
Computing creates heat. Maxwell's demon taught us that doing 1 & 1 and getting one creates heat. Every bit of computation creates heat - superconductor or no. This is an inescapable fact of classical computation. "Ahh," you say " - but you can do quantum computation"... and yes, it may work... and if you can get a quantum computer with a kilobit of qbits into space, I will be very impressed.
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One of the things that damages superconductors is radiation. On earth we've got a nice atmosphere blocking the worst of it. Chips in space tend to be radiation hardened. The JWST is using a BAE RAD750. The 750 should be something that rings a bell in the mind of people... its a PPC 750 - the type in a Macintosh G3... running between 110 and 200 Mhz (that is not a typo, it is not Ghz but Mhz).
High temperature super conductors (we're not dealing with the 10 kelvin but rather about 80 kelvin (still colder than -250 °F) are very sensitive to damage to their lattice. As they accumulate damage they become less superconductive and that causes problems when you've got a resistor heating up in the cryogenic computer.
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Your descriptions of the technology for superconducting computers is in the lab, at best decades from being something resembling science fact (much less a fact that you can lift into space).
Right. You build your computers out of superconductors, and they don't get hot.
Sadly, they also don't compute.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold? Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's shadow and the sun hits you.
If/when we get high-performance superconducting computers, we wouldn't need to put the computers in space in the first place.
You've invented a room-temperature superconducting material? No?
Didn't think so.
Currently available superconductors still need liquid nitrogen cooling, meaning they're not feasible for in-orbit installations.
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
The computer hardware only needs to run enough AI compute to be smart enough to convince Musk that it's working. It should be fine.
Superconductors. Average temperature in space is around 4 K.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.
I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.
It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
> There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP.
For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping.
There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
> I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out.
I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
you do know about the Sun? Earth? and the Moon? where would you get this 4 kelvin?
Why is there no cooling necessary?
Space is cold - 4 K. Superconductors.
Repeating the word "superconductor" does not convince anyone of anything.
I don’t care about convincing anyone. A question was asked and I answered the best I could with the time I had at hand.
Also read by comment above that discusses WHY superconductors could be the key to cooler electronics in space.
Do you know the lifespan of those satellites? Do you know how many of those fall out (sorry, de-orbited) of space every year?
Do you know the cost of sending up a payload of them?
Do you know how much $$ you need to extract from those payloads to make the cost of sending them up make sense?
Do you know how much they've lied about Starlink revenue and subscription counts?
Your exuberance for this topic is only matched by your lack of understanding about it.